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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten a lot of use out of my iPad 3 and, up until it stopped getting updates and the touch screen started breaking down in the past few months, found no reason to upgrade or replace it. I use it nearly daily but mostly for reading textbooks and novels, reviewing language cards, and occasionally watching YouTube videos. It's been extremely useful for taking to the gym and allowing me to study while on the elliptical.

But I got it in a different time. There weren't many tablets available at the time and a retina screen was critical for small text. As I've looked around recently, it's become very hard to justify getting a new iPad over something like the surface.

How do people justify the purchase in 2017? Seriously asking as I am looking to replace my iPad with something in the next few weeks.

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I also have an old iPad 3. It certainly shows it's age and is significantly slower than my iPhone 7 Plus. However, the iPad 3 has worked well for FIVE years! I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed, it has never been affected by malware, spyware, or some buggy crap software which wasted hours of my time. It has not disappointed me once in those 5 years.

Why would I stray away from a product that has not let me down for so long? Is the surface kickstand and pen input worth:

- having to learn a new OS - not having facetime - not having imessage (90% of my friends and family are on iOS devices) - risking time lost due to malware, bloatware, blue screen, etc

Sure there are tablets out there that are thinner, faster, cheaper and have more features. I just don't care! I rather pay $200-300 more for a device that I will use almost every day for the next 1000-1500 days. Once iPads, iPhones, iMacs start wasting my time with random problems then I will shop around. Until then there is absolutely nothing that would make me switch brands.

>not having imessage (90% of my friends and family are on iOS device)

iMessage sees very little usage outside of the US, where OP may not be based.

Or maybe it sees little usage inside of your own country? Even when most people use other messaging platforms, I see it used as the family/iphone-possessing-close-friends channel of choice, since it transparently replaces SMS.

Substitute "your own country" with "most countries outside the US" and you're about right. iOS prevalence simply isn't there.

While SMS fallback is handled brilliantly by iMessage, as soon as people are using it as more than a glorified sms client (group chat, file transfer...) and/or are really concerned about end-to-end encryption, the limitations of SMS/MMS start to become a dealbreaker.

iMessage makes it impractical to have a conversation with anybody on prepaid Android. Sure you can send MMSs and SMSs to them, but are they going to send more than a couple back? Nope.

> it has never been affected by malware, spyware

that you know of

I came very close to replacing my Mac Air with a Surface Pro 4 this past year, mostly didn't because of compatibility issues with Adobe Illustrator, my favorite drawing app.

MS claims 4h battery life at best, which I did find was true... after you dig deep into legacy control panels that look like it's still 1995. Out of the box the Pro 4 loves to wake up in your bag, look for wifi, then stay awake for a while doing absolutely nothing but burning through power, and you maybe get like 1h of actual use when you get to wherever you were going. I'm currently using a Wacom Mobile Studio^1, which also gets 4h. I'm constantly AWARE of and WORRIED ABOUT the thing's power levels in a way I'm not on the iPads. (Or the Mac Air for that matter.)

Apple lists like 9-10h for all current iPad models.

I may have my experience colored by mostly running a couple of desktop apps on my Win10 tablets, but I really find that Windows is not a very good tablet OS. Even in "tablet mode", which I keep it in pretty much all the time. It's just clunky and weird and maybe some of that's because this is the first Windows machine I've ever owned in my life, I dunno.

In general I don't think I'd recommend getting a Win10 tablet to replace an iPad. Get one if you have a Windows app you want to run, if you just wanna read stuff then buy a new iPad and don't worry about finding new apps to do the same stuff.

1: heavy, expensive, no kickstand, doesn't fit in most 13" bags. But it's stylus talks to Adobe Illustrator and that's my medium of choice.

it's become very hard to justify getting a new iPad over something like the surface.

The cheapest iPad is less than half the price of the cheapest surface, and if you only need the iPad features then the surface is really expensive.

edit: Seems you can still get the old Surface 3, which only costs a bit more than an iPad.

You could get a cheaper Windows tablet from another vendor, however, and they're still great.

To be fair, they're hit or miss. Due to circumstances I've used three extensively. The asus t100 and chi t300, which were both excellent in their price segment, and the lenovo miix 310, which was terrible (but that mostly seems to be due to w10 which took a vehement dislike to the 32 gb emmc storage).

I've also used ipads extensively and can say that windows devices are not ipad replacements or vice versa. An ipad can't do what a windows tablet can, but the reverse is equally true. Windows doesn't have the rich touch-friendly app ecosystem of iOS. I use both types of devices for the things they're good at, but neither can replace the other.

Even as a pretty big Windows fan, and someone who would personally choose a surface pro over an iPad, I find it impossible to recommend Windows tablets to people considering an iPad. The apps and user experience just isn't there when it comes to doing the sort of things people do on an iPad.

I just bought a Surface 3 recently. The kickstand is nice, the weight is tolerable, and the 3:2 aspect ratio is really why I bought it. Everything else about it sucks, from a tablet user perspective.

Every once in a while when you reboot, you'll have to wait for Windows to install its updates. Sleep/hibernate are more finicky than an iPad, which sips so little power in idle that it never has to hibernate. Desktop mode is absolutely terrible to use with fingers. Tablet mode has missing functionality so you'll have to switch to desktop mode periodically. Battery life is worse, even though Windows makes use of hibernate. There's bugs that plague the Surface line that don't get addressed for a long time. I had to manually disable wake from sleep using keyboard/mouse on my SP1 otherwise it would stay in a powered mode and never properly hibernate. A normal user can't do that.

Lack of apps is a real thing. There's no official YouTube app. You can use the desktop site, but every time you try to pull up the controls, the player interprets it as a touch and plays/pauses the video. On the Netflix app, if you try to drag the slider, there's no feedback from the slider so you can't see if you've actually dragged it or not until you let go. Makes for some very imprecise scrubbing.

I could go on and on, but an iPad is simply better for media consumption if you don't need a specific Windows tool.

> it's become very hard to justify getting a new iPad over something like the surface

Well the iPad starts at $329 and the Surface starts at $799... The Surface only makes sense if you want a large pro device

The Surface is also a lot heavier and more fatiguing to use as a handheld tablet.

Surface Pro 4 still has a range of issues that makes for a frustrating use in the tablet mode. The major one being on-screen keyboard randomly not showing up a lot of times when you focus on an input field in a browser or some other application, and with no easy way to summon it manually. The fact that these issues happen with a MS OS running on a MS device - and not some OEM's - does not inspire trust in other Windows tablets either.

I pretty much see iPads as family devices these days. Sure, that's not to say they can't be fun to have as personal "I will be the only person using this" devices, but since the original iPad:

(1) phones have gotten a lot better (and optionally bigger);

(2) laptops have gotten a lot more portable.

If I had kids, I could easily justify a family iPad. But I don't, so the device just feels like an expensive, mostly redundant luxury item.

Another thing worth mentioning is that we now live in a world where a company like Nintendo is making a serious gaming-oriented tablet with proper controls. This is something I've been wanting Apple to embrace for years, and they never did. If the Switch takes off (and it seems like there's a good chance of that), it makes a lot more sense for me to invest in that than an iPad.

Music production/performance. The iPad does few things objectively better than Android and touch responsiveness when it comes to playing music apps is one of them. There's a 100-400ms delay with Android for some reason. I had heard they'd gotten better recently but it's not as good as the iPad.

The iPad has a lot of great emulations of older synths and exciting new apps that aren't available anywhere else. Some big names have also made apps, like Korg, Propellerheads, and Native Instruments. Check out iPolysix, iProphet, Animoog, DM1, Auria, E.L.S.A., Beatsurfing, Impaktor, BIAS Amp, Audiobus, Swoopster, Sparkle, Galileo, Thumbjam, Steel Guitar, Arpeggionome, Orphion, Xynthesizr, Glitchbreaks, Loopy, and Gadget.

Still have an iPad 2, which works fine except for Safari on a heavy site, runs out of memory I think. Very happy from that angle.

But, I've moved to a Nexus 10 for movie watching, for the screen and because it is so much easier to copy a freaking file to it! I need to copy movies ripped from DVD often, or the occasional download. Apple goes out of their way to prevent that, and why I can't really recommend purchasing another. A shame really, talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

> Apple goes out of their way to prevent that

Hardly... drag ripped movie into iTunes, sync movie to iPad, done. Or just give up on DVDs and buy/stream digital movies :-)

No, I use Linux on my laptop, hasn't worked with Apple devices for three years or so. But even if I didn't, I would not use that 100mb monstrosity to copy a file.

I do stream with Netflix, works fine on Android. Many of the files are from torrents as well, DVD is not the issue in itself.

There is no advantage for iPad for a movie-watching tablet, and why I switched for that use case.

I don't use my iPad much these days, but when I did, I used nPlayer: a media playing app which got around many of the iOS restrictions. Plays many different formats, has its own integrated file manager, and provides ways to copy files directly including Windows file shares or streaming files

VLC allows it, but it is a pain because I have to transfer over wifi which is about ten times slower than via cable.

Technically speaking, in the US, ripping a DVD is still considered illegal under the DMCA, so don't expect Apple to do you any favors there.

Personally, I use Plex running on a headless Linux box instead.

There are many other use cases to copying files.

For example a few days ago I wanted to copy a pdf of my resume to my phone and had to install an app to do it. Not acceptable.

The iPad stylus is amazing. Very noticeably lower latency and better accuracy than other tablets I tried.

If you want to use your device for taking notes, proofreading documents, writing in margins of PDFs, doodling, illustration, etc., then the “pro” iPad models are lovely.

Have an iPad 3, I find a lot of apps to be close to unusable at this point. Safari is a huge offender and it's full of ui ticks when I open the app or webpage. It seems all my apps are struggling.

It's very hard for me to justify a new iPad. I really feel apple could've gone with the OS X on an iPad approach and really taken the whole market. Instead they are slowly adding iOS to Mac OS.

I've found the frosted glass blur slows safari down significantly. There is an option to disable the frosted glass look in settings > general > accessibility > increase contrast > reduce transparency. My iPad Mini 2 runs much faster with this enabled.

Edit:

This only applies to the 4th generation iPad and up. Apparently the frosted glass look was never enabled for the third gen iPad.

I'm on an iPad 2 and most all of the music programs I use on the regular are without issue. Garage Band. Figure. Some synths. Safari works great too, only the occasional hiccup.

Functionally it's still fine, I just fear the day when it will be put out to pasture by Apple in spite of my TLC and enjoyment.

I've never felt compelled to visit one of the nearby shops on Harry Hines by the Korean Community to jailbreak an Apple device, but I think in this case I'll be tempted.

I also still have an iPad 2 which is going strong. Is slow but does everything I use it for (movies, magazines, browsing). Is hard to justify upgrading something that works fine. And I bought a Kindle Fire 8 HD on Black Friday for $60, so in a sense I have already upgraded.

Turn off all background notifications, and it'll run like new.

It didn't become slower. You just added a lot more stuff for it to do.

Sorry, but no. Did a factory reset and installed only a minimum of stuff, turned off as much as is sensible. Still runs like a dog.

If you use the iPad Mail program, how many email accounts is your mail program connected to? I reduced mine to 1 and it changed everything.

Hah. Haven't even connected any with Mail.app nowadays since it was always such a resource hog with even only two accounts (especially in the earlier iOS days).

But, no offense, don't measures like these feel rather ridiculous? They are tantamount to "just don't use your Ipad (much) and it works great!"

Unless the UI is plagued with actual blood-sucking parasites, s/ticks/tics/.

iPad is relatively cheap and quite powerful. Compared to Android tablets it has more software and usually it is better adapted to tablet factor. It is way cheaper than surface and iOS is better than windows if you want it for "couch use", e.g.: reading/browsing/casual gaming etc. Also it has more battery life.

I jumped ship from iPads once I bought an 11" MB AIR. This ended me getting an email on the iPad, reading it, then deciding I wanted a keyboard to respond.

I do miss the simplicity for watching videos on flights, though.

> How do people justify the purchase in 2017?

I have had an iPad Pro 9.7" for half a year, and had also used the 12.9" for a month. My experience and impressions so far:

• Perfect for using in bed, or outdoors when you don't need the power of a laptop/desktop OS. A phone is too small, cannot have a physical keyboard, and even the thinnest+lightest laptop is too bulky in comparison.

• The Apple Pencil beats every other stylus out there in just about everything. [1]

• With the Smart Keyboard, split-view multitasking, iCloud Drive, desktop-quality games, and many iPad-exclusive apps like Procreate [2], the iPad and iOS easily fulfills 50% of my computing needs, and I'm sure it can do 90% of what most people need to do on a desktop or laptop. The iCloud Drive file picker is really bad for a large number of files though, but it should hopefully improve in iOS 11.

• Nothing beats reading books on an iPad. The E Ink display on a Kindle may be better on the eyes for text, but the ability to multitask and listen to my music or watch a video while reading a book puts the iPad ahead.

• I can use the iPad as a secondary display and even a drawing tablet for native macOS/Windows apps with [3] and [4].

• The wide color screen is amazing and True Tone makes it easier on the eyes over long periods of usage.

• Thanks to the true multitouch and split-view you can actually control two apps at once, unlike on a desktop OS where there's only mouse pointer and single-window focus (even in Windows on a touchscreen, the last time I check you couldn't put a finger on different apps and interact with their controls at the same time. Has this changed in the latest Windows 10 update?)

• The 12.9" was great to use indoors but awkward in public, and doesn't have a wide color screen or a good camera yet. Especially gorgeous games like Samorost 3 [5] were even more amazing on the bigger screen.

I'm happy with the performance, but I'll be getting the next iPad Pro this year if it has a sleeker form, like significantly reduced bezels.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMA25CqKcn8

[2] http://procreate.si

[3] https://www.duetdisplay.com

[4] http://astropad.com

[5] http://samorost3.net/

Oh and 3D/Force Touch and "Taptic" feedback too, is what would make me buy the next iPad Pro.

As for desktop-quality games I mean stuff like FTL, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, XCOM, Inner World, Grim Fandango, Monkey Island (sadly no longer available), Banner Saga, Machinarium and many other faithful ports, some of which are actually more convenient to play on a tablet. Even among all the microtransaction-plagued crap there are a few mobile-only games with quality or depth comparable to desktop titles.

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