I Work IT in a institution with 290 employees and have had 5 switch to iPad Pro's to "replace" their laptop. I am now 5 for 5 with all asking for their laptop back.
iPadOS is nothing more than iPhoneOS renamed and the device is still too heavily crippled for desktop/laptop replacement.
In my mini test case scenario I never said a word..simply the employee asked for iPad Pro.. I just handed it to them... waited... then about 2 weeks later they asked for laptop back.
Not sure what Apple's plan here is but they continue to market this to schools and workplaces as a laptop replacement but refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted.
On the contrary, I have owned MacBook Pros from the first to the last 17", then again every model since the 16". I also have iPad Pro with magic keyboard and touch pad. I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me.
I've also been CTO at mega bank and hedge funds where we've rolled these out along side laptops. I've found that after initial objections, folks tend to agree. After a month or two, white collars who are not devs generally have switched to carrying the iPads, not laptops. Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale.
Users do have to think differently. That's ROUGH. Employees will ask for their old thing back if it changes their workflow, period. (See the book "Who Moved My Cheese?")
If they just use it, they generally find out it's fine. Could even be argued the Office / Teams ecosystem is superior.
Bonus: Letting employees have TWO screens (MacBook + iPad) also gives them two retina class monitors, portable, fantastic for hoteling or remote work or work from home. Two screens are better than one, and two that go with you are amazing. The new keyboard/cursor sharing while each device runs its own apps, with copy paste and drag drop between them is even cooler. In this model, the iPad Pro can become a Teams or Slack device, for instance, while other work stays on Mac, so you just wander off to a meeting with your collaboration tools intact. Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go.
Anything in the gSuite is terrible on iPadOS. Excel is also fairly crippled. I can’t see how it’s usable at all.
Even just for emailing, GMail at least is a terrible application on iPad. For examples, cannot format anything, or view one email while writing another (that isn’t a reply).
I primarily use mine for
* Note taking
* Browsing/showing PDFs in a construction engineering setting. Nothing is faster or as flexible.
* Sketching for construction drawings
But the lack of good tabular worksheet and emails beyond quick replies pushes me back to my laptop all the time.
Thing that really kills iPad for me is the web browsing experience. I just find iOS Safari so limiting.
It's also needlessly slow (considering M1). I suspect they have some optimisations designed for memory constrained devices like iPhone tuned in the same way for iPad.
Also ad blocker support is limited.
Oh and in a lot of video calling apps, if I try and browse something in Safari while the meeting is happening, then I'll suddenly stop sending video. Though that isn't strictly a Safari issue, more a Apple holding back features from third-party developer issue.
" I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me."
Interesting, how long have you been iPad Pro only? At the price point of the iPad pro with a keyboard and touch-pad.. why not just buy a laptop like the MacBook Air?
Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard seems less convenient than just using something like the MacBook Air. Unless I am missing something here.
The fact that you can do all your work on an iPad as well as you could do it on a Laptop may say more about your work than the devices. I do not mean this in an insulting way, but perhaps your work is so disconnected from technology or the creative process that you could do it, no matter the device you're using?
I cannot imagine doing my job on on iPad, it's way too limited. can you open more than one google doc at a time yet? run desktop extensions on the web? open complex sheets/excel files? I have no idea what job other than sending emails and being on video calls all day could work on an ipad.
Ran a similar play recently and found a similar result.
Can’t understate how much people want the nice/fancy/pro device too. It’s hard to lure people off MBPs to generic PC laptops or chromebooks but an iPad Pro + magic keyboard is shiny enough.
Not just lower support cost, but much higher security bar at a lower cost too. Having been at the same fund, and other big banks, that’s an important consideration. Strong MDM, yubikey support if you want it, decent app sandboxing, etc. gives a lot of security control in a nicer manner than on a desktop OS.
Finally, I think the Office/GSuite issue depends so much on usecase and who’s using which bits of each suite. Gmail is so much nicer than Outlook, but GDrive horrible organizationally compared to OneDrive, while GDocs collab beats O365, etc.
This isn't contrary. Quite the opposite. None of the cases you present are iPad only. They are iPad alongside laptops. They might find cases where the iPad is fine, but none are iPad only.
And your "bonus" is basically an iPad Pro as a $1000+ chat device.
Now, if you mean that they added an iPad Pro, and eventually stopped ever using their laptop, that's a different story, but that's not what you said in your comment.
I know people who are laptop power users who are fine traveling with just a tablet and an external keyboard. (They still use a laptop when they're not traveling.)
Good for them but I've never been able to make it work for me. I'll just carry the extra weight. But, to your point, it's also true that, beyond getting an external keyboard, I've never really committed to making a tablet work for me as my only travel device (other than a phone).
IMO companies should give their employees one e-ink screen instead to save their eyes. Most office-style work can be done well on those screens and they are much healthier. I now barely use paper as I use an A4 Onyx tablet with e-ink screen and do most of my notes there. It's so much better than using iPad for that.
> Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go.
Completely lost me. You don't logout, close all your windows, and so on, when you undock/unplug and go mobile. I never have a problem picking up and going with my laptop, then coming back to my desk right how I left it. And the 27" monitors (32" also common here) are far, far better for productivity and dev work than a 13" ipad HDR screen. iPad is a poor choice for a 2nd screen.
You can even create a separate workspace for when you detach. I don't do that myself but plenty of my colleagues do. (If you don't do that then sometimes a window re-homes itself if you resize or move it while undocked, thinking that is its new home.)
You might not need anything else if you only do some presentation work, data display or write some mails.
It also shines for people that like to write non-digitally. Awesome to draw a quick sketch. But for anything else? Not really a working device. It seems to convince management because Apple is shiny.
This isn't some topic about thinking differently, this is a topic of being restricted, which frankly iOS (before rebranding) simply does to you. Maybe you can map all your workflows to some iOS tool, but I assure you that a notebook is still more powerful. The two monitors might indeed be an advantage though and I hate any form of hoteling and luckily don't do that too often.
>> Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale.
Genuine question - what is the biggest time sink/cost for support on laptops? Put another way, exactly why do support costs drop so much with the ipads?
I think for me a major bottleneck of using iPad as laptop is that the screen is still gonna be on heavier compared to keyboard, and the whole combo doesn't feel as solid and sturdy as a good laptop does. iPad feel more physically free in some ways (you can just use screen etc ...), and physically restrictive in others (doesn't feel like one big sturdy unit with keyboard).
That all aside, as an engineer it's too restrictive and less fun. I'm sure it can get a lot of other non-programming workflows done quite well though.
I used the iPad Pro for about 2 years for nothing but productivity apps and it was overall pretty great.
It wasn't without issue though, here's what I ran into:
1. I didn't run any dev tools on the iPad. That's insane. I used a laptop running macOS for that.
2. Google Docs updates would always ship with weird bugs, like if I'm editing a cell in a Google Sheet and hit space, the space wouldn't insert.
3. There's loads of issues with drag and drop in most apps. Dragging and dropping a picture from Photos into a document is the most common flow which works in some apps, but not in others.
The plus sides:
1. The built-in cellular connection is amazing. I wish MacBook Airs would ship with built-in cellular.
2. The Apple Pencil (2nd gen) is great if you design software or UX.
> but refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted
What would the point of "adding functionality to the OS" be? If they wanted to put macOS on iPads, they'd just put macOS on iPads.
My understanding at Apple's strategy here is that they're simultaneously exploring two different GUI paradigms — almost pitting them against one-another to see which wins (or, if you like, making a hedged bet):
• macOS, for building "Unix pipeline-like" workflows where you point different programs-as-tools at the same document or take one program's output as another's input. Apple encourages macOS developers to make this kind of app.
• iPadOS, for building "all-in-one silo" workflows (think: Photoshop, Garage Band, XCode), where the developer intends to solve fully for a use-case, such that people with that use-case can get by using only their app. In these cases, rather than interacting with other apps, a siloed app will embed whatever other accessory workflows a user might need, either directly (e.g. XCode embedding a terminal console) or through plugins (Photoshop plugins, Garage Band VST support.) The user might use other apps at the same time as this app, but not in a way where the apps are sharing data or interacting in any way; rather merely using each app to "do what it does" — e.g. referencing a design diagram in Miro while implementing that design in XCode, and writing down reminders in some reminders app. (Thus, the iPadOS 16's Stage Manager, which assumes you want several apps on screen at once, but doesn't implement drag-and-drop between apps or any other kind of useful inter-app interaction.)
As a user, as long as each user-story you have has been perfectly addressed by some particular siloed iPadOS app, then iPadOS should work for you. (And there are a lot of people whose user-stories have all been perfectly addressed by these siloed iPadOS apps — mostly, people with boring, predictable, traditional workflows. Novelists; illustrators; business executives; possibly salespeople.)
However, if your workflow is niche or "constantly reinventing itself" enough that nobody's ever going to make a siloed app specifically for your needs, and so you expect to get things done by throwing files between various different tools all day — then iPadOS is never going to work for you. You need a desktop OS designed around that kind of thing.
Well, MacOS won. Silos don't work, and they especially don't work when Apple controls the means of distribution single-handedly. MacOS has clutched onto a shred of relevance by letting the user install package managers, download software from the web, run software compilers, and so much more. There is not a future where iPadOS "wins" and MacOS is slayed in ritual combat, or something. It's obviously not a contest, and even by your own admission the separation of these OSes is mostly arbitrary. Apple knows they're gimping the iPad, they're just expecting other people to not care.
Everyone would be happy if Apple focused more on perfecting the iPad's hardware instead of pushing iPadOS to the brink. An iPad with options to run MacOS, iPadOS or Linux would be the knockout product-of-the-decade for Apple IMO. Judging by the design of Monterey, I think iPad/Mac convergence seems fairly likely.
I don't even understand the advantage of an iPad for non-drawing work. It's just a worse laptop with a too-small keyboard that can fall off and a square screen so it's not good to watch video on and an OS that doesn't do anything well. But Mac laptops are amazing, run all the same software, and don't have any of these problems.
I can't adapt to the workflow on an iPad either, and I have tried. I have really tried. However, I have seen other that have. To them the iPad is easy and macOS is overly complicated.
I am not sure if general computing is changing or there are now two branches, but I have watched other people do things on iPads that I consider impossible. Even simple things, like working in Excel, I find challenging on an iPad. But when I watch someone else who sort of "grew up" on iOS work in Excel on an iPad they are like some kind of wizard. I have found myself more than once now asking someone, "How did you do that?" feelsbadman.jpg
I think a lot comes down to muscle memory and shortcuts. While I know many/most of the shortcuts on iPadOS they are not automatic for me the way they are on macOS. I often have to think, "Wait… how do I do this on the iPad again," for even simple things. I even find drawing applications unintuitive. In the Adobe suite everything is explicit. In Procreate everything is unlabeled. This is even true in consumer applications, like Facebook vs Snapchat. Pinch here, tap there. Swipe from one of the four sides to reveal some function that is completely hidden. But for some people this is intuitive. There is an additional layer (or two) of UI abstraction in iOS/iPadOS that I have not internalized.
There definitely ARE some things you can't do on an iPad, but that list is actually shorter than you might think. There are a lot of things that you can do, they are just done differently… and in a way that, at least for me, seems to take a lot more work. But for others they are like, "Eww, why do I have to look for an icon and move the cursor over to it when I can just…" and then they proceed to input what is essentially sign language into the screen while holding down a modifier key.
I have an iPad Pro M1 11" with the Magic Keyboard.
It doesn't fall off or detach unexpectedly at all. And the keyboard size is close enough to "normal" that I don't notice for normal typing. The only thing I miss is a dedicated ESC key.
All that said, it only replaced my personal laptop. I continue to use a 13" MBP at work.
Work is not always about content creation, some people work mostly by consuming content (reading websites, browsing photos, selecting movie clips, navigating PDFs, or something else) and iPad is great for consuming content.
> In my mini test case scenario I never said a word..simply the employee asked for iPad Pro.. I just handed it to them... waited... then about 2 weeks later they asked for laptop back.
If you work in IT with hundreds of staff members, why would you let them pick their own devices with zero guidance? This seems like a recipe for disaster no matter which product is picked. Do you let them do this with laptops / printers / operating systems / etc.?
Nope there are only three computer models to choose from and that we support. The iPad Pro was added as a 4th option based on a higher admin recommendation (not in IT ). However we are now back to supporting 3 models.
My daughter is 16 and has used an iPad for school for many years. Latptops are foreign to her. Same for her cohort. They are the next generation of adults and have replaced desktops and laptops with iPads and iPhones.
That is scary to me, an entire generation growing up within the walled garden and perceiving only Apple's products as what is possible for computers to accomplish. These computers are confining, as much as their constriction liberates the user in its simplicity, it is a real constriction. To me, that's exactly what the FLOSS movement hoped to avoid, and failed to do so by advocating for a purist f/open stance rather than winning smaller battles with open source at least staying in the war for market share.
It honestly just needs virtualization. They don't care about evolving the product because they are mortified of cannibalizing a revenue stream in an official way.
Only nerds and IT would bother with virtualization and they'd net a new sale.
I've been eyeing an iPad Pro, but it's just a colossal waste as it trends strongly toward only consumption, which is frankly a poor purchase.
Programming on the iPad was OK, in the sense that Blink Shell is a better ssh client than PuTTY, and I don't want to carry my desktop around with me. Eventually I switched back to a Linux 2-in-1 laptop -- it is nice to be able to run GUI applications locally, but it is nowhere near as good a tablet as an iPad despite whatever tweaking I try...
What kills it for me are the apps where you can't copy a single word. e.g. Apple's own Messages app, you're forced to copy the whole message.
Same for the spell checker. For some reason I have ridiculous trouble triggering it in certain apps. I can see the mistake underlined in red but I really struggle to get trigger the correction popup instead of the "copy, lookup, etc" popup.
Maybe it's just me but I don't think I could consider an iPad as laptop replacements without some basic changes to iPadOS.
This one is ridiculous. On Reddit I always want to quote part of a message or copy a phrase to translate it, and it’s literally impossible to do. You have to copy the whole message, paste it in a text editor or in Notes, and finally copy what you actually wanted to copy.
By design it is never going to be able to replace a "laptop" running desktop OS. If the workplace is not designed to work with iPad, then I doubt anyone really can replace even a MacBook with iPad.
Your "mini test" is invalid because they are allowed to choose, ie intermixing all sort of OSes together. In that case it is very likely any workflow the iPad excels at are not used in the workplace, and vice versa that anyone else' workflow is really traditional (as simple as depending on the file system a lot) that doesn't play well with iPad.
When your mini test doesn't agree with how successful it is (for business to deploy iPad), it just means your mini test is nowhere near the norm.
Eg you mentioned school, that's the best case for the iPad to shine, because everyone are mandated to use iPad, and the IT would have already figure out how to perform all needed tasks. (And bonus is that the students are a blank state with no prior bias on how to do a certain thing.)
I can't speak to how Apple attempts to make deals with schools and workplaces, but their normal consumer marketing seems to pretty clearly highlight the differences between a MacBook and an iPad. If anything they seem to go out of their way to maintain significant differences in the two operating systems (which, ironically, is also a very popular complaint in tech circles).
Kids who don’t know better might become accustomed to it and, unless they are power users or interested to become that, they might prefer to scrape by with the iPad.
There is pretty strong evidence that people aren’t great at using full fledged operating systems and feel much more comfortable on a slate with a dumbed down UI
I would not say that “people aren’t great at using full fledged operating systems” but that fully fledged operating systems aren’t great at accommodating people.
I don't think Apple is marketing it as heavily as you think at replacing Workplace laptops, but moreso consumer laptops. iPad is a delightfully simple device for consuming any kind of media, editing photos and videos, light to medium gaming, and doing little creative things.
Without a clear description of what these employees were using their iPads for, it's impossible for anyone else to use this info to determine if their scenario fits yours.
Your ability to use iPad full-time depends heavily on the type of work you do.
Execs and task oriented workers are great iPad use cases. In a global org I’m familiar with, they run about 15k iPads, about 5-10% of the IT engaged headcount. Senior execs in large orgs in particular are ideal in the iPad environment.
For schools, I think the iPad sweet spot is grade K-4 for dedicated devices; 4-8 is Chrome and 8+ can be Mac/Chrome/PC. For shared or purpose dedicated devices, iPads fit every level.
Lots of other use case are limited by legacy or enterprise software. Police patrol car, medical point of service and point of sale are examples of use cases where iPads would be the ideal solution, but for the existing software.
Is everything they do web-based? Or did they just not know that it won't run any desktop software and that even if there is an app-store version it's usually cut down to half the features of the desktop version?
I can attest to this, I worked in IT back in 2011 at a school where teachers loved the idea of iPad's over their clunky laptops.
However, in time, they all needed their laptops back and either gave the iPad back or worked 50/50 across both devices.
I have no doubt that today the iPad is more useful for students and teachers, but if you don't have a defined workflow that easily allows for the use of iPads teachers won't use them. We're all too familiar with the way in which Windows works and it integrates well with the networks companies use.
I use the ipad for reading music scores but would never replace it with a laptop. M1 and M2 is overkill for a consumption device that doesn't have a real file system accessible to the user.
We have over 3000 employees with Apple equipment as their primary device, and probably 200 of them are iPad Pro only.
They do serve different niches than laptops, but with a keyboard case in an Office 365 environment, they can be full office/productivity replacements for anyone who prioritizes light travel over running local software.
Either-or obviously desktop. But why either-or not both and an iphone as well. The form factor is so different. And if you develop with lots of internet and book/pdf to reference.
You can ask me to choose TV or ipad or even in reading novel kindle or … obviously not job setting but it is just different tools.
It's a great consumption device though - ever since Google stopped paying attention to the tablet space we have an iPad 9.7 that lays in the kitchen and all my family members only touch it for watching Netflix or YouTube.
Even for browsing it feels very slow compared to Surface tablet or even Firefox on M1 MBP now a days.
Because web apps can actually opens up the flexibility of a classical computer system again. For strategic purposes Apples support here is minimal.
Still not optimal, but certainly far better for education, not only because of the price and because you don't make yourself dependent on a single manufacturer or at least to a lesser degree.
Largest problem is the lack of education of teachers though.
I don't like how Apple is making the iPad more laptop-y. My ideal is to use a normal desktop computer, and an iPad. No laptop. But if I had to pick only one of course it would be a laptop.
ipads (like phones) are appliances... designed for consuming. Much like a microwave or a fridge. they're designed for very specific scenarios. sure you could make it do other things... but it will not be very effective.
Laptops are swiss-army knives. you can create/consume/compute and they're pretty effective at all those things.
One current day iPad killer app IMO is Procreate. It's basically a more intuitive version of Adobe Illustrator completely optimized for iPad + iPen. I bought my then girlfriend (now wife :D) an iPad for her bday in 2020 accepting the risk that we're spending a lot of money on an activity she might not stick with (digital illustration). Happy to report that I was totally wrong and we have def gotten our money's worth through the countless hours she has logged creating art. If she didn't have such a stellar app like Procreate she probably would have tried out other illustration methods. Not a guerilla marketing plug, I have no vested interest in Apple or Procreate. Just sharing an app outside my space that seems to not get much attention here on HN. You can check out my wife's art at https://instagram.com/gabjoart
Not even Photoshop -- Photoshop is mainly about editing, well, photos, while ProCreate is about natural-looking brush painting. Photoshop certainly has brushes, but it's not even attempting any kind of naturalism. People don't generally "paint" in Photoshop. [Edit: from comments below, I stand corrected. Guess it's just the people I know.]
I'm not sure what you call that category of app -- painting apps? Natural-media painting apps? (Although you can choose to make them quite unnatural-looking too if you want.) Fractal Design Painter (later Corel Painter) invented the category I believe, way back in 1991.
And only the digital painting parts of Photoshop, not photo editing. Which isn't to say that it's not a great app! It's just not a full on replacement for Illustrator of Photoshop.
If you want an alternative to Illustrator or Photoshop, Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo are more in that vein.
Came here to +1 on the likelihood of transition thoughts and the discovery of procreate.
I also happened to gift an iPad Pro to my wife. Her daily workflow for work are apps like gdocs and buffer and the ipad handles that just fine. I think we underestimate how similar is the regular job workflow and overestimate the particular setup we need for programming / engineering.
And for digital art, she started from 0 and is now a pro at ClipStudio art and Procreate. She is working on her webtoon and has created plenty of nfts and twitter profile pictures on fiverr. I’ve started bringing an ipad to engineering lectures since it has also helped me
a great deal with note taking.
I bought an iPad in 2020 fully thinking it’s gonna collect dust like all my other tablets over the years.
Nowadays I use it more than my laptop. With the magic keyboard and pen, it really has become the perfect portable computing device. Great for writing, great for sketching diagrams, even good for light coding (like for code samples). And it is fantastic for creating talk slides and even presenting full day workshops. Love it
Was waiting for today’s announcement to upgrade. Running into memory issues lately :D
Bought my wife an iPad in 2020 as well with the same fear that it will largely go unused.
She teaches at a university and would normally write copious notes on dozens of notebooks.
She got a copy of Goodnotes for iPad and started using it for her notes. 2 years later, she hasn’t touched any of her physical notes. All her study material is on iPad.
I bought my wife an iPad Pro and then a Macbook Air after she complained she couldn't do some things on the iPad. Well, eventually she figured out how to do it on the iPad and the MBA has been collecting dust. I adopted the MBA because my trusty old MBP is damn near geriatric (2015) and it's like a shot in the arm. I should have bought it sooner for myself.
It seems like iPad's main feature is that Apple refuses to put a touchscreen or 180degree hinge on a laptop. Laptop has a bigger screen for drawing and coding.
Agreed. Procreate is a masterclass in iPad app design. Everything runs so smoothly, the features are deep but the interface is still beginner-friendly, it's a joy to draw in with the Apple Pencil, and it has really good options available for exporting your work. Plus, it automatically records a timelapse of every project that you can render out at the end, which is a small feature that I absolutely adore. All that for a single-time purchase? Heck yeah.
Similar story here, my girlfriend uses the iPad/pencil/procreate to draw commissions for people. She absolutely loves it, went did an art degree but then went down a different career path and is now getting back into it.
In a world filled with apps that require a subscription, a persistent internet connection or filled to the brim with ads, procreate really is a breath of fresh air. Just buy it and use it like in the good old days.
I can’t believe it’s just a one-time $10 fee instead of the ridiculous and increasing creative cloud monthly/annual fees. I don’t know how they do it. Maybe it’ll be an annual fee one day but at least the app is worth it.
I love how "Desktop-class apps" means extremely basic features available decades ago on desktop: "consistent undo and redo, a redesigned inline find-and-replace experience, a new document menu, customizable toolbars, and the ability to change file extensions, view folder size".
It seems reasonable for "desktop-class" to refer to the basic features that have typically distinguished desktop personal computers from alternatives like smartphones and tablets. What else would you expect "desktop-class" to mean?
Powerful features that are more than a glorified ^Z. Reminding actions to finger shortcuts, quick access through a command palette, etc.
It'd be like me calling McDonald's restaurant-class because they could suddenly give you a plate. Sure, it's a component, but the porcelain isn't why I go to a restaurant, it's to have a qualified cook doing things with his expertise.
It has always been artificial market segmentation. Their message is clear: don't buy apple if you want a laptop with a touchscreen. Apple will only sell you oversized phones and regular laptops.
> don't buy apple if you want a laptop with a touchscreen
Keep buying Apple laptops, got it. I know that a large number of people keep asking for laptop with touchscreen, but this is one design decision where I whole heartedly with Apple. Touchscreen on laptops make no sense. The use case for a touchscreen is significantly different from a laptop that it makes sense to have two classes of devices.
Then again, I don't really get the large number of iPads sold either. It seems like an extremely niche devices which would only find a use case in certain types of industry.
I'm always surprised at the pushback from people when the topic of touchscreen laptops comes up. I love mine, even if I don't use it a ton. It's a collection of delightful little things: a modal dialog box that I just reach up and tap Okay. Resting four fingers on the back of the display and using a thumb to scroll a web page. Any situation (like on an airplane) where space is limited, reaching for the screen can be better than using a touchpad. I don't use it instead of mouse/touchpad, but I use it as an additional input, and again, it's delightful.
Apple could let customers launch iPad apps on their Macs and use a touchscreen. But they don't, because they'd rather sell you two devices. It's silly, artificial market segmentation.
And don't buy a Windows laptop if you want a laptop without a touchscreen because the UI will be designed for touch even if you only use a mouse. Although macOS is unfortunately trending in this direction also.
You could actually get a full desktop experience from a tablet back in 2003, with products like the NEC Versa Litepad [1] running Windows XP. With a fully-fledged x86 processor, you could run anything a desktop could run.
It was pretty neat, but I can tell you from experience that coding using handwriting recognition isn't a great experience :)
All of the Tablet PC's running XP Tablet Edition were terrible. I will die on that hill. I tried probably about 10 different versions and the company I worked for was a reseller for them so I got to play with a lot of them. It was just Windows XP with pen input slapped on and it *sucked*.
True, but only for users of the v2 Apple Pencil with the new iPad Pro. For folks with v1, or with an iPad/Pro that doesn't support hover (or who just use our fingers), discoverability will continue to be a challenge...
I really struggle to find a use case for the iPad over my Macbook Pro from 2014.
- It sits on my lap with the screen sitting upright without the need for a case to sit it upright
- I prefer using a keyboard over a touch screen for desktop like applications and browsing
- The trackpad being on my lap or directly in front of me is more ergonomically friendly than having to reach forward to touch the screen
If I was to need to buy another laptop, it would be another Macbook over an iPad.
I'd argue that is exactly what they are doing. Their promotional material and many users are already using iPads as desktops... and they seem to be catering to them.
My 2017 iPad Pro can do that. I can tap and drag on the cursor to move it. I can also long-tap and drag on the spacebar to move the cursor like a touchpad. I can also drag with 2 fingers anywhere on the keyboard to move the cursor like a touchpad. The first 2 options also work on my iPhone.
Safari history has been broken for something like 4-5 years. About 1% of time back button will take you one step too far (i.e. will show your home page instead of google serp)
As a commment on the /r/iPad subreddit said, Apple accidentally made the most future-proof devices with the 2018 iPad Pros. There is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.
I own a 2018 11" iPP, and it has been a game-changer in the way I have studied. After buying it, I haven't printed a single sheet of paper for note-taking. It's also a much better Netflix device than my phone.
I was just thinking this myself. I have the 12.9" 2018 iPad Pro and was considering pulling the trigger on this new iPad Pro announced today. But I really have no reason to, my current one runs perfectly and I've even got the floating keyboard case which is backwards compatible with it. It's replaced my laptop entirely, instead I just ssh into my Mac at home and use vim if I feel like writing some code on the road or from bed.
Honestly have no complaints with this 2018 model, it's one of my favorite pieces of hardware I've ever owned and in fact is what introduced me to the Apple ecosystem (where I'm now fully submersed) in the first place.
> in fact is what introduced me to the Apple ecosystem (where I'm now fully submersed) in the first place.
If you’d be willing to expand on this, I’d be very interested to hear more.
I used to be all-in on Apple devices circa 2010, but drifted back to Windows and Android for gaming & better notification UX (and Windows being a much more familiar OS to me). However, I don’t game on PC anymore, and I’ve become increasingly unhappy with the privacy concerns regarding Google’s ecosystem.
I got a 2020 iPad and the UX is leagues ahead of my aging Samsung Galaxy S9. Given this and the aforementioned privacy concerns, I’ve been considering once again switching to an iPhone and MacBook. Therefore, it would be very valuable to me to hear more about your experiences (and others who have made the same switch and happen to read this).
My 12.9” eventually had like 30 min battery life and I refuse to spend so much on a legit battery replacement.
Instead I mounted it on the side of our refrigerator to be always plugged in.
Our kids use it with friends to look at family pictures, play multiplayer arcade games, stream music, etc.
It became kind of a mini home console for them (it is mounted lower for their height).
It might be a good model for internet browsing as well, and texting, since it forces open communication as they wean into entering the dangerous internet (for some, it can be as dangerous as learning to drive…)
Apple devices last a long time and get software updates for many years. You really don't need to upgrade unless either (A) the new device has features you want, or (B) your current device stops getting software updates, or potentially (C) you have some new use case that would be more performant on a newer device.
It depends on what you're planning to do with these notes.
For me notebooks go straight to paper recycling after a while, the space and burden is just too much. Anything I intend to last any devent amount of time is digitized, and scanning notebooks is a PITA.
Sure. But most of my notes are lecture slides
as PDFs, and I have e-books also as PDFs. It's much easier to annotate directly on a PDF than to have to print them, annotate, scan, and ensure the scan quality is good.
At some point, 'it's cheaper' is just not a good enough argument for paper notebooks versus the sheer versatility of an iPad.
I would have to buy a veritable cart-load of writing stationery to emulate everything I do on my iPad. It would likely still be cheaper, yes, but it would also be much more of a pain in the neck.
Except at some point those books end up in some storage box in the basement, or potentially tossed out. Digital notes are forever with iCloud/Dropbox/etc and can be searched anytime.
Bingo. I also have a 2018 11" iPad Pro, and the only things that would even nudge me in the direction of upgrading is a landscape-friendly selfie camera (like the new iPad got), significantly smaller bezels, Touch ID (again, the regular iPad has this), and a better display (11" doesn't have mini-LED).
Serious question, would you recommend buying a refurb 2018 for modest usage over the new iPad 10.9"? It's about 100nits brighter, a bit lighter with a bit larger screen and supports pencil 2. Looks like they are about the same price as well.
I would, certainly. I'm also using a 2018 Pro. The additional screen size makes more difference to me than brightness; I never have the brightness all the way up anyway.
That's where I'm at - I keep an eye on new releases because I'm a nerd and I like toys. But realistically I'm not going to shell out for them at least until this one stops getting OS updates.
I don't work-work on it, but it does sit beside me all day. Notes, manuals, calls, music etc. Sharing my screen, pulling up a diagram and the pencil is my favourite way to explain things on calls lately. Then I can just shoot them a pdf when we're done to cut out 'n keep.
I see nothing today that changes this for me - just new toys that I look forward to seeing in a few years.
I (almost) exclusively used “the new iPad” for all my studying and note taking a decade ago. Notability was my go-to app, and I used the touchscreen exclusively. It was a wonderful setup.
You’re right that the 2018 iPads are great. But people buying their first powerful ipad really don’t want a 2018 machine so Apple keeps improving them. Software improves as time goes on.
> There is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.
Nomad Sculpt. There is no such thing as increased CPU power, often you're dealing with multiple millions of polygons. There is even limitation in the app saying "don't go over X number of polygons" because of CPU limitations. And it's the reason why I'm buying new iPad Pro - to be able to work with more polygons faster.
Video games are more enjoyable with the increased processing power!
Where the 2018 model struggles at high frame rates, the M1 version enables more fluid gameplay at 95-120fps. The new M2 would likely deliver more consistent 120fps performance given the advertised 15% CPU and 35% GPU uplift.
That’s because apple hasn’t introduced any major new features to the ipad pro hardware since then. A 4 year old iphone is also just as future-proof but it doesn’t feel like that since they’ve added many new features to later models.
I own a 2018 11" and an M1 12.9" and there's plenty of times the 11" has failed to cope with something the 12.9" barely breaks a sweat over. I'm not sure what you do with yours, but it's provably untrue that there is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.
As far as I know, this is the first Apple hardware to support Wifi 6E, which is something I've been waiting on for what feels like forever.
I'm hoping the rumored new laptops will also support 6E.
For those that don't know, Wifi-6E uses the 6Ghz band, and I anticipate it will be very helpful in crowded residential environments where lots of Wifi APs are all landing on the same few 2.4 and 5Ghz channels.
I can't understand the emphasis on more bandwidth. The pain with wifi is overwhelmingly dominated by the slowness establishing a connection (why does it take more than a second?!), with connection reliability and latency (for video calls) also being important.
"Wifi 7: 10 Terrabyte/sec transfer speeds" *yawn*
"Wifi 7: Connects in 500 ms, latency 20 ms, tri-band fallover for 5-nines reliability" *Opens checkbook*
I've never once noticed slowness in connecting as bothering me at all. Are you connecting to new Wi-Fi networks hundreds of times a day or something? My iPad just... stays connected to the networks it knows.
And I believe that higher bandwidth is the solution to better reliability and latency when you've got lots of devices sharing the same router, or other interference. Isn't that how digital radio works?
Agreed! The thing about 6ghz is that it doesn't travel through walls as well, and tends to have shorter range in general.
On the surface, this seems like a negative, but if you're in a crowded apartment building, it can actually be a major benefit. Even if a bunch of your neighbors end up using it on the same channel as you, you won't experience as much interference because the walls will attenuate their signals.
Of course, a single AP might not reliably cover your entire home in 6ghz, but you can always fall back to 2.4 and 5ghz and/or get more APs.
Additionally, WiFi 6 (and 6e) is better in general at detecting neighboring networks across all frequency bands and reducing interference automatically.
Pretty surprised they left the front camera on the side of the device. I can't figure out why they would think that makes sense after using it even once. It's so awkward trying to do a meeting and I have this weird camera angle coming from the corner of my face. The alternative is portrait orientation, which puts the camera really far from the center of the screen - feels like it's coming from above or below my face - and puts my video feed opposite to the orientation of my audience's screens, while also not being able to lean on the folded case.
Yeah this would be an improvement I think, considering how little I've seen iPads used in portrait mode it's a little surprising they haven't done it already. I'm guessing it's to support the pencil charging, since the new iPad does have cameras in the expected landscape location but only supports pencil 1
It works perfectly fine. Only main difference is that, in landscape mode, instead of people seeing you look slightly down instead of into the camera (like laptops), people see you look slightly left instead of into the camera.
99% of people seeing your image in the call won't notice or care. Especially when things like your lighting setup make most of the difference that people do notice, which has nothing to do with the camera you're using.
Everyone's creepily staring into nothing anyway. Except those of us who try to look at the camera instead of the screen most of the time. Which means we're not actually looking at anyone's face, even though it looks like we are, which is another problem.
Being a bit off-center is the least of the problems with video calls.
Are you saying unusable because attachment to keyboard skews image centering/symmetry?
I use my iPad for video calls (Zoom) all the freaking time and it's fine, but perhaps that's because i have it in the tall orientation so the camera aligns.
In case of the MacBook and the iPad, seems like it’s more about the OS. At least that’s what most comments here are mentioning when comparing an iPad to a MacBook.
They keep on pushing on the power of the iPads. Out of curiosity, does anyone really use their iPads for something they’d consider really compute intensive? I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos. Any time I want to do anything complex or computationally intensive I find a laptop to be much more efficient, both in terms of the OS flexibility and better input devices.
Heck yeah. "Reading" sounds boring and easy, except when you have to quickly skim through 600-page PDFs with illustrations, and switch between those. This is a common use case for anybody designing electronics. I will take every CPU cycle I can get.
The existing iPads were already the best devices for this kind of thing, but faster is always better.
I still find it sad that:
a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
b) Companies do not ship better iPad apps. At this point, Fusion 360 would work better on this M2 iPad than on most PC machines, but we only get a half-baked "viewer" thing which doesn't really do anything useful.
> a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful. And I don't do any of them, gaming aside (I have a mediocre Windows PC for that, and even that is often using only a fraction of its power for gaming).
The one and only time I've given my m1 Air a real workout is playing with one of those AI art generators, but it's not like that was something I needed to do, or I'd have felt like I was really missing out if I hadn't done it. I did it because I could and it was low-effort.
This made me wonder: Why do PDFs feel so much slower and bulkier compared to something like viewing HTML over a browser? When it comes to displaying static images and text, shouldn't PDFs outperform HTML pages by miles?
>Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
Doesn't faster CPU tend to imply potentially better battery life?
> I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos.
I think HN forgets the 'pros' using the iPad Pros are video, photography, visual-arts and music professionals.
I'm as disappointed as the next dev on HN that iPadOS still doesn't allow me to run a full version of Xcode. But then I remember there are perfectly good laptops for that, and I'm not the target audience for these devices
I mean, I don’t understand how I could really use an iPad in my workflow as a photographer. Everything is slower without a keyboard, and for raw editing I use a whole bunch of knobs.
I could see maybe using it at the right type of session to quickly review images on a larger screen, but the last time I looked into it there wasn’t a super great way of doing that. Maybe I could cull photos on my iPad but unless I transfer for the photos to it and then back off I’d need to work over my network and that’d probably be slow…
Everything relating to moving files, SD cards, etc. is just a hassle in Apple tablet/phone world. Ironically, a PC just works.
Right now I'm drawing comics using CLIP Studio Paint, which really is a desktop app that runs seamlessly on the iPad (literally it appears to be the same code as what I have on my Mac!)
Each page is ~5000x7000px with dozens of layers including many effects and even 3D models. Even my 2018 iPad Pro breezes through this workflow. With the pencil, it feels like exactly the right device for what I'm doing.
I would play games on my iPad... but there aren't very many that work, because Apple hasn't spent the time (or money) making Metal support widespread. Really, they should just fund / build their own MoltenVK implementation, but I would guess that they don't want to support two paths. It's surprising how MoltenVK only has one full time dev, I could easily see Apple throwing some money at that with huge returns.
My compute intensive tablet activities involves a cheap chromebook duet remote desktopping into an actual desktop already efficiently setup for my workflows. I'd rather wait for reliable remote work solutions / infra than try to cope with subpar workflows.
Give me XCode and Preview (I use the pdf page-re-arranging/deleting/etc a lot) and finally put a fucking calculator on iPad OS and I can stop using macbooks at all. I mean for personal devices, at least, I'd still use one for work since they give me one anyway.
I doubt that. Many very serious artists use Procreate on an iPad as their primary medium, and I honestly can't think of a better tool without jumping about a thousand dollars in price, loath as I am to say it.
Readit News
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.?
https://getutm.app/
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 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.
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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.
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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...
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- 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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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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.