iPad Pro M2(apple.com) |
iPad Pro M2(apple.com) |
But I guess the artists, musicians, video-editors and photographers using them professionally would disagree, if they ever came here.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I bet you they won't want to lug around the proXDR screens and beefy macs at that point.
- 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.
I had high hopes for the Files app when it debuted, and was very disappointed.
I do. But be glad we generally don't, it would probably lower the quality of discussion.
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.
Dear Apple,
I want my iPad to become a Finder based full-fat macOS when it's on the Magic Keyboard and I want it to be Springboard when I take it off the Magic Keyboard.
Make it happen already.
A device like this would be fantastic with a full desktop environment. Many desktop apps have solid touchscreen support now, ChromeOS has demonstrated that mobile apps can be run seamlessly in a desktop window manager, and you could easily dock it to use with bluetooth mouse/keyboard.
Alas, we've got to put up with a hi-res smartphone OS because that is Apple's vision for this product line.
I'm just spitballing though. The iPad probably won't make sense for most of us until it's discontinued or they add macOS to it, whichever comes first.
That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I don't do anything that needs a desktop class processor.
Artists do love the performance though, people use them for video editing or large image editing with lots of layers.
Edit to add - 12.9" is also helpful for using two apps in splitscreen. Might become less important with Stage Manager, we'll see how I like that.
I'm disappointed there aren't more pen-based programming experiences out there, but I can't really think of any useful ones myself either.
* Working on game assets using the Affinity tools (Designer and Photo)
* Second monitor for my Mac when I'm not at my desk
* Chat/videoconference tool, leaving me able to use my computer during virtual meetings
* Travel machine. I can do most of my office-y stuff on it, and use it to ssh into production things. Gitpod lets me do some light coding from there in a pinch, but if I'm planning on a lot of that I usually just carry the Macbook. Because a portable rig with two monitors is damn nice for writing code.
* Reading and annotating PDFs
* Documentation viewing while writing code
* General reading
* Using a square reader to process payments
I suspect that this will likely easily be replaced by a current Air when the time comes, but it's easily useful enough for me to want it. And when you consider that the ASUS portable monitors run in the $300-400 range, and the Wacoms are around $600, I don't feel like I'm severely overpaying.
This is a notable differentiator that's easy to see and feel for iPad users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otlDSjAq2hI
> Yeah, I don't really know who Apple is hoping to sell these to. […] The iPad probably won't make sense for most of us until it's discontinued or they add macOS to it, whichever comes first.
Apple knows who they're selling to. Apple's iPad dominates the global tablet market (along with Samsung and Amazon), so there's evidence that it's made sense for its target market for some time now.
I've thought this about every iPad model they've made, but obviously I'm wrong every time. I'm sure there are specific professionals who will find this useful, but in my guess is that most iPads are sold for casual use. As to why you would buy the higher-end model, because if you're in the market for an iPad, you probably have disposable income, you might as well get the shiniest one you can.
Having a more powerful ipad allows more and more sophisticated tools to be made for it. Apple brings the capability and developers take advantage.
I know that iPads are used in the architecture/construction industry for example. AutoCAD has some products that came out of the PlanGrid acquisition.
I see the resident Apple bashers are already warming up their cannons firing a few rounds.
But perhaps we need to take a step back here for a moment....
First you need to consider the security and general platform profile of iOS which is fundamentally different from MacOS. Running MacOS would greatly weaken the iOS security profile of Apple mobile devices, and you have to remember that the devices are not just used by consumers but they are used widely in the corporate world too. iOS loaded with corporate apps is a much more attractive security footprint for corporate IT departments. Personally speaking, I very much like the tightened security footprint of iOS. I wouldn't want to run full-blown MacOS on my phone or tablet, even if I could !
Second, prior to Apple silicon, non-mobile hardware ran on Intel. So Apple were justifiably technically constrained by that fact. However, if you observe Apple today though, you can see MacOS on Apple Silicon allows you to install iPhone/iPad apps simply by downloading them from the App store as you would on an Apple mobile device. I would argue therefore that with time, we may see further blurring of boundaries in both directions.
Hard to admin my home server, program, etc on an iPad, even though it has a much faster processor and way better battery life.
I realize this is a bit of a niche usecase but apple shipping a Terminal.app for iOS/iPadOS would be a game changer.
Unless (almost) all their apps (including third-party ones) would seamlessly switch from a mouse-driven MacOS UI to a pen/finger drive iPad UI, I think most users would be disappointed with that.
As a user experience it's no less jarring than GeForce Now, XBox remote play, Steam Link, Plex, VNC apps, iSH, Blink, etc.
Please don't listen to Veliladon. Keep the iPad as it's own thing. In fact, make it more iPad-y and less Mac-y.
If I want a Mac, I'll buy a Mac.
And Apple doesn't want you running unapproved software so that's never going to happen unless macOS gets a lockdown mode (only app store apps, no terminal or Unix access, etc).
From the press release: > Full external display support for Stage Manager on M1 and M2 iPad models will be available in a software update later this year.
External display support is supposed to come back in an update later this year. Presumably that part will still require an M1 or newer processor.
I agree. We're talking about a device that most people use to watch video though, so they're not going to really be revving it beyond 24hz.
120hz screens are great, but if I didn't play first-person shooters with my friends then I'd have no reason to use mine. Like I said, an OLED panel makes much more sense for the iPad, and arguably the Macbook Pro.
Interesting. I don't use my iPad for video much, but I'm going to assume you're right and I'm in the minority. In that case, a nice benefit for cinephiles is that 120 Hz is an integer multiple of 24 Hz, while 60 Hz is not.
I'd love to get a newer iPad, but the price is bananas for me given the use case. I bought the pre-2018 model and it's still holding on but I'm going to be bummed when this one reaches the end of it's usable life due to software updates and such because I can't afford (or, justify maybe) one of the newer models.
The really cool thing about this, for those who haven't tried, is that in landscape mode the 12.9" is really really close to the same size as a two-page comic spread, so you can read them like they were intended, not one page at a time. It's a little smaller, but not much. Makes a huge difference vs. page-at-a-time reading.
(I use Chunky, which is amazing and I wish the author charged money for it or had more options to pay them than one mostly-unnecessary and really-cheap IAP, because it's really good and I never want it to go away)
I've heard Panels is decent as well.
Video editing is also crazy good on an iPad Pro and iPhones.
That makes the iPad fill many many use cases.
I can do about 80% of my work on my iPad
It's an e-ink display with paper like friction and if you really want to, you can shell into the linux system it runs on.
I have owned both a gen 1 remarkable, and an older iPad Pro. In my opinion, the remarkable is garbage in comparison. The note taking app is just so far behind. And cross platform seems it’s never going to happen.
My note taking app of choice is always: write, by stylus labs. It’s wonderful, and really expresses what I hoped pen based writing would always be. Especially the undo-wheel. For quickly scrolling back a whole word or sentence. But the real killer here is that it’s cross platform. I can move the notes to the native Linux app or the native windows app.
That having been said, I am forever annoyed that I can’t run Xcode on either Linux or my $1000+ iPad. Also, on the iPad, there are ridiculous restrictions in how you are allowed to run apps side by side in split screen.
/sigh
So the race for the good pen note taking device is still on for me.
I have hope that soon the Pine Note will take off and allow me to finally run write by stylus labs on a platform with development tools. In this case Linux.
Again, Apple could win me back by opening access to dev tools. Either in the iPad itself or cross platform on Linux/windows—or by allowing me to install macOS on the iPad.
Remarkable could win me back by opening the platform and allowing my to install write by stylus labs.
Dell or Lenovo could win the race by shipping a 2-in-1 with a current generation processor and Linux officially supported, and preferably pre installed.
But it honestly looks like pine 64 is out in front in this race.
It's linux under the cover that you can connect to if you know the password (in the settings).
There's a whole bunch of apps that you can side load into it.
https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
I'm not sure there's anything preventing you from installing write by stylus labs other than that no one appears to have ported it to the device.
Make no mistake. Their stuff is great. But I'm not buying something they tell me is for early adopters unless I want to write code for it and use JTAG to load that code, possibly with a handbuilt wiring harness.
This right here. I literally only buy them for the screen size, and because Android tablets are... really bad and largely have much worse (for my purposes) software available, even if I could find one in that size.
I never really push the processor or graphics capabilities.
The screen size is incredible for: PDF reading, drawing and art generally, a little video editing maybe, sheet music display and other music purposes, comic book reading, as a portable second screen for a Macbook (it's a very similar size to a 13" Macbook screen), portable SSH terminal, remote desktop, and yeah, watching Netflix or whatever.
But I could easily get by with the brains of a much lower-end model. However, I expect the larger, higher-quality (for faster refresh for drawing and such) screen is a big chunk of their cost to manufacture it, so I'm not sure how much cheaper such a thing would really be.
I truly don't even know what I might do with one that'd really use all that horsepower. Gaming I guess? But I don't like my games vanishing or breaking when I update an OS, so I don't game on iOS very much. Pinball and (now that it's been re-released, finally) Angry Birds. That's about it.
The main bummer with the base iPad display is that it's still using sRGB, while Apple has been using P3 gamut pretty much everywhere else since the iPhone 7. Not sure if I'd downgrade to that one, but I'd be fine with a 12.9" iPad Air.
That's why I still think an "iPad Max" makes much more sense. Even to professionals, the iPad is ultimately a content consumption device. So, Apple ought to lean into that. Make an iPad you can love with a big screen and punchy OLED panel, while cutting back on the CPU cores to optimize for battery life and thermals. Even if they never put Stage Manager on it and ditched the LIDAR camera, I think these things would sell like hotcakes at the right price.
Think lawyers, finance, basically anyone doing “deals” is in this category. As someone with about 3 million frequent flier miles lying around I’ve seen a whole lot of them in airports.
I have one too. Big screen, thin profile can be used in an airplane seat or wherever, has a cell connection so you don’t need to fuss with wifi to send back comments on something quickly.
It’s really a great application for these things. Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares, when you live on the road and shit depends on you, you just max out all the choices and press the order button.
I bet you can find used ones for much cheaper. I still love my aging 2nd generation 12.9" iPad Pro from 2017. Of course we would all love products even more if they were cheaper, law of demand and all that.
I've never side loaded anything on the remarkable, but... I do own one.. so it's worth dusting it off and trying.
Thanks again for the link to the reHackable repo. Hacker News threads seem to cool off quick, but if I have any luck, I'll report back here.
Like you, I'm willing to take Pine64 at their word that they are still "crowdsourcing system level software". I am eagerly awaiting their monthly blog update/podcast. Tragically, last month's update didn't happen. So, we've all been a little in the dark.
Lower income consumers who would appreciate lower prices.
Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company at this point. The only way for them to grow another 50% from where they are today is through mass market adoption by regular people.
Or maybe these high end devices aren’t meant to drive revenue as much as they are meant to keep power users happy while focusing on other revenue streams for meaningful revenue growth.
Is there some benefit to using this over a laptop?
(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.
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.
It’s the perfect thing to take travelling. And on the work side, the pen is astonishingly good as is the app ecosystem.
It also functions as a second screen for a macbook.
Is it necessary? No. Have I spent money in worse? Absolutely.
A tablet is integrated into my daily routine to a degree a laptop will never be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
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.
> Wi‑Fi 6E and 5G
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.
Wireless charging pads also have cables. Do you hide them in table surfaces?
1. Random example: https://www.belkin.com/th/chargers/wireless/charging-stands-...
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).
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).
The more portable nature?
Edit: only dual-band. no 6GHz? WTF, Apple? Definitely skipping this generation, then.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 threw a GitHub runner on mine so I can do iOS builds from it.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N362JCW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
I bought it 18 months ago and still haven't needed to replace it. I can clean it as easily as the bare screen.
These types of layers add a very tiny amount of color distortion, so I guess not recommended if you do professional graphics work on the thing.
The iPad is a very bad laptop, but is a great tablet.
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.
Can I attach proper 4K display with keyboard and mouse if necessary? Will it work like desktop (when it comes to browser)?
While I don't really think that iPad is a good replacement for Macbook Air, that's an interesting option at least.
But I'm probably switching to a Samsung phone that folds.
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.
Not with that OS
Who will make that app first?
And off topic but what about connecting a mouse to this thing?
And what about compiling apps on it!?
What about running OpenGL on non emulated linux on this?
I know the GPU is being worked on but do the old OpenGL parts work allready or is that part of the reverse engineering?
I wish you could change batteries yourself... hopefully they have moved towards that: 3/10 on the old one: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad+Pro+11-Inch+Teardown/11...
Last gen: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212527
This gen, right on the product page: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/
Hopefully the EU breaks Apples‘ App Store Monopoly.
Just let iPads run MacOS already.
(or put the nice touch screen on MacBooks, same difference)
If it's too awkward to use macOS without a keyboard and pointing device then, sure, maybe MacOS mode isn't the default.
I remote into MacOS and Windows machines from my iPad (12.9" iPad + Apple's keyboard/trackpad case + Jump) and it works well.
First gen AirPods Pro have around 130ms latency. Headphone jack has around 50ms. [1]
I can't find any measurements for second gen AirPods Pro.
1. https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/tech-news-airpods-pro-latenc...
For any serious work you'll probably be around a decent audio interface anyway.
I mean it will be ported to iPad Pro in a week.
Edit: You are right: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/rar2uh/will_it_...
They will crack the bootloader eventually!
Yes, it's slightly more inconvenient but I wouldn't dismiss the whole product due to a missing port few people (including me) use these days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I tried going all iPad and my husband opted for iPad Pro as personal computer - it is woefully underutilized.
"And that's not just me"
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.
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.
My experience at mega bank is that the IT department is often delusional about what business users actually do.
This is what everyone I know with both devices does. I still prefer my Mac, but I'm in the minority in the under-fifty crowd.
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).
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.)
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.
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?
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.
1) What tasks do the people you manage tend to do on their machines?
2) Why replace the laptops with iPads if you expected it to be disruptive for a month?
Seems annoying actually.
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.
don't you always have your phone on you? i don't have any issue at all tethering.
Is that really an Apple problem? Sounds like Google is just lazy with QA on Apple devices.
Did you try Numbers or Excel and have similar problems?
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.
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.
And then I tried sending a pdf by email. Oh well.
Can I share it on the corporate FTP ? Oh no.
Let me airdrop this to you... Wait... is this a windows / android device ?
...
Alright, I'll just use my laptop. My iPad is too niche for this workflow.
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.
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.
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.?
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.
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.
This should be solved at the OS level.
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.)
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
What you call a dumbed down UI, I call streamlined. It's simple, focused, and fast.
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'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.
"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*
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
+ 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 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.
You can get surprisingly far with just GarageBand³.
¹ https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/garageband-projects... ² https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/share-a-project-to-... ³ https://www.melodynest.com/hit-songs-produced-on-garageband/
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.
Yes I mean Smart Cover.
> Seriously, they should bring smart folio back. The one that doesn't have the unnecessary backside but only the side and the front cover.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQ4L2ZM/A/ipad-smart-cove...
Magnetically attached to an edge, only covers the front when "closed", the back when open, or can be folded up to provide a stand.
It's my favorite case.
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?
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.)
Why do all these niceties go out the window when the alternative is an iPad?
Based on the use case, a simple last-gen iPad should do the job just as well.
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.
I don't think I could do that now but there seems to be a sizable crowd who works that way and maybe is the future.
Yeah, it requires a new ipad.
I'm a bit salty, not gonna lie. This has been basic on wacoms forever.
I am still amazed by my 2018 iPad pro four years later!
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.
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.
Do people actually use the iPad for machine learning?
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 think the pandemic really accelerated things. A lot more students are using iPads, rather than paper notebooks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even for browsing it feels very slow compared to Surface tablet or even Firefox on M1 MBP now a days.
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.
Trying to quickly navigate between apps, edit, and copy and paste, is an exercise in frustration.
Is this your opinion or was there any feedback from those 5 users?
Laptops are swiss-army knives. you can create/consume/compute and they're pretty effective at all those things.
I think you meant to or should compare it to Photoshop
By the way, if anyone is interested in a vector drawing app, I highly recommend Concepts.
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.
If you want an alternative to Illustrator or Photoshop, Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo are more in that vein.
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’ll send her your wife’s insta, here is her’s: https://www.instagram.com/yanora_draws/
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
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.
Very happy with the purchase.
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.
For example, PineTab runs full desktop GNU/Linux.
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.
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.
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.
It was pretty neat, but I can tell you from experience that coding using handwriting recognition isn't a great experience :)
[1] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nec-versa-litepad-tablet-pc-vlp...
- 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.
So seems about right.
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)
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.
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…)
OTOH you can buy a whole lot of $3 spiral notebooks for the price of an ipad pro
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.
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.
Despite its age, the 2018 iPads still fare very well for most tasks.
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.
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.
It seems kind of crazy to say there's nothing that makes full use of the CPU.
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.
They've since walked that back, and while it is being reworked will be coming to a14 models after all, probably sans the external display support.
Now, I had joined also from my tablet but samsung put the camera in the center when in landscape mode and got no such remarks and I was just smiling
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.
Being a bit off-center is the least of the problems with video calls.
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.
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.
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.
Faster compiling is nice I guess. That's... it.
Doesn't faster CPU tend to imply potentially better battery life?
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 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.
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.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 8)
But, It does make me salty that an M2 iPad can't run Xcode. I wish they would figure that out as it would greatly streamline my setup.
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.
As it stands I have absolutely no interest. It's generous to describe "Stage Manager" as a gimmick.
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.
> 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.
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 wish they'd just ship macOS as an "app" on their iPads
Without the pencil it's $2148.
If I get a 1TB 13 Inch M2 Macbook (16GB ram) it's 1899.
I have been avoiding getting an iPad because it can't run xCode, and it's cheaper for me to get the laptop.
Sure, some people are buying both, but I'm sure there are many like me that aren't because of this exact trade off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- GSuite for email, calendar, etc - Zoom for candidate meetings - Greenhouse as an ATS
Then those all have dedicated iPad apps which are very usable.
Same story for office admin teams, EAs, etc.
It is. Take a screenshot, then select the text in the screenshot.
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.
The magic keyboard works great. You can even get BT knock offs for 1/3 the price. Works fine on your lap.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.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.
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.
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.
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.
A creative user with a Windows laptop can do it easily unless it’s really tightly locked and controlled.
It is functional enough to be useful, if the other person on the line is good at following instructions.
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.
But in this case the M2 has efficiency improvements, so yes.
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.
Other OSs don't do that, so it seems like it takes a longer time.
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.
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.
If only there were another browser other than Safari and Chromium that didn't have those limitations...
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.
Does this happen to be with low power mode enabled?
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?
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.
VR/AR makes people feel sick and are fundamentally uncomfortable in a way a screen not strapped to your face isn’t.
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.
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.)
This does get slower for some pathological PDFs, which is why an even faster CPU would help.
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.
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.)
For about 6 months iMovie had this crazy bug on my iPad pro that made it extremely laggy.
The software side of iOS is definitely suffering lately, and somethings on the ipad have felt like a downgrade.
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.
GP was right, iPadOS is never going to work for anyone having to send a pdf to someone else.
I have had the FOSS version of Gitpods working well on my iPad mini.. if that helps.
I know it's not local, and we're mainly talking about using the local power at our finger-tips.. but, it's an option.
> 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].
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02528v1.pdf
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.
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!).
From illustrators to matte painters, photoshop is probably the most common painting app you’ll find.
>People don't generally paint in photoshop
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.
Photoshop has an old, strong brand, allthe name is a bit anachronistic, but it has grown to be a product for all 2D visual art.
Edit: I see Rebelle is quite a bit like Paint. Shame they tell fibs about being “first” to emulate physical colour mixing. Alas, not iPadOS.
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.
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.
And, I think many people work like this if it will ever be available in wall gardened ipad.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 use mine to watch Netflix.
Plus, I'm interested if the person I'm replying to actually thinks it's _better_ than a Mac or just "also good".
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.
Had to go back to Adobe
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.
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.
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.
My M2 air is as thick as my iPad ...
Having said that it is also MUCH heavier (relative to what I'd like an iPad to be) and has a noticeably bigger screen.
Not sure how fast those gaps get closed.
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.
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.
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.
There's the Files app.
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).
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.
Image files?.... they obviously want to be mixed in with your photos!
Media files?.... you don't want those!, would you like to subscribe to Apple Music?
As far as image processing apps, I've been using procreate and affinity designer. Both use the file system and not the photos app.
As far as audio processing, apple's own garage band app works natively with audio files and lets you slice and dice them.
1. cellular + eSIM, missing from Air (WHY, Apple, why?)
2. detaches into perfect touchscreen tablet, Air doesn't
3. Apple Pencil (requires "Paperlike" for texture): https://paperlike.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Considering how long ago that is, they must be pretty old. I mean, I'm 58 and I can just barely remember that time.
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.)
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.
Edit: here's a picture of my iPad ssh'd into my Mac and editing some F# code. It works well! https://www.dropbox.com/s/ilh16cesqj8ovi9/IMG_7535.jpeg?dl=0
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...
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.
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.
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!
https://github.com/WaldiPL/playbackSpeed
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/playback-spee...
And let me know if it works on say a youtube video with speeds above 3x?
I disagree. A gesture-based workflow won't replace Pro Tools' keyboard shortcuts, unfortunately.
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.
But thanks for generously replying with so much detail. Much appreciated.
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).
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.
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.
Main effect for me has been to drop them like a steaming deuce, but not everyone has the luxury.
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.
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).
Gmail and Calendar are great. Drive is also sub-par in experience when compared to Dropbox (probably Box as well though I've not used it)
Oddly Sheets is the only one I like. It is good enough for most use cases and simpler and easier to use than Excel.
I've never even considered using Docs or Slides.
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.
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.
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.
Web views aren’t the same, neither is the JS runtime configuration, hence the performance differences.
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.
Let's check in again in a few device generations.
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.
The company decided it was not possible using a specific product. You decided to use a product where it was not possible.
I bought the device, why shouldn't I?
Still can't just treat the phone as a drive and put files on there.
(edit: or trivially share a folder on the LAN over wifi, without even needing the USB cable, if you're considering the iOS device a 'real computer')
The interface exposed is just not mounting a remote file system.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/transfer-files-mac-...
You can do it with a third party app
https://mobiletrans.wondershare.com/iphone-transfer/transfer...