My iPad Pro experiment | Hacker News Reader

My iPad Pro experiment

lemire.me

52 pointsdeafcalculus78 comments

> But PCs are still around. > > I’m not happy about this.

He is not happy that everyone not switched from real computers to media-consumption gadgets where programs are curated by central company? Where even content displayed in these programs must be censored using Victorian standards?

Maybe we should replace internet with TV? You can watch news and talk shows on TV, and picture is better! Why use ancient Sumerian technology of text from 3000 BC, when you have 4K video with quadro sound? Disruptive!

> > But PCs are still around. > > I’m not happy about this.

> He is not happy that everyone not switched from real computers to media-consumption gadgets where programs are curated by central company?

A more charitable reading would be that he isn’t happy that more general computing hasn’t yet been effectively delivered on (what he sees as) a tablet’s convenient form factor.

> media-consumption gadgets

How are people still repeating this? Better sensor suite, better (outward-facing!) camera, and better built-in ability to use it as a drawing surface than pretty much any laptop (certainly none combines all those things), an OS that's actually suitable for creative audio work and doesn't otherwise get in one's way all the damn time (Android, Windows, Linux), and the software to match.

But it doesn't have a mouse and the keyboard's an add-on so it must just be for watching Youtube I guess.

I need none of those things to play video games and develop software.

What does that have to do with whether tablets are more than media consumption devices?

Text selection on iPad has been royal pain since iOS 6 (if I’m remembering correctly), and Apple has done absolutely nothing to remedy the situation since. You tap hold once to select a word, then you drag this tiny blue dot as it glitches out and jumps to a random spot on the screen every time you move your finger. It’s insanity, and I can’t believe Apple went another year without fixing it in iOS 11.

Probably because it's basically the same experience on Android.

Text selection on inside a textarea is pretty easy on the iPad and iPhone if you are using the on-screen keyboards. On the iPhone you can use force-touch on the keyboard area and then move the cursor wherever you wish. Force-pressing again starts a selection. On the iPad you use two fingers to drag across the on-screen keyboard and tap with two fingers begin selecting, which doesn‘t really work if you are using a hardware keyboard. So it‘s a mixed bag.

I just learned the two-finger drag last week and it's a game changer.

I really need to spend some time sitting through the iOS tutorials to see what other functionality I'm missing out on.

This has the common newer era iOS issue though of, yea it works pretty good but it completely fails the "will you figure it out on your own" test. Someone had to show me, and all my friends had no idea it was even a thing.

The old selection method is still terrible and needs to be revamped

This only works for text you're editing. Selecting text on a webpage or anywhere the keyboard isn't available is still painful.

A thousand times yes! I have to back this up sentiment 100%. Text selection on an iPad for mousers like myself is so frustrating that it's absolutely a show stopper.

I understand that there are lots of gesture/touch target reasons for the current infuriating, knob-based interface, but I tried to switch to an iPad for full-time long form writing and just couldn't. Basic text entry is okay, but doing any sort of serious editing, i.e. selecting and moving a sentence somewhere else in a paragraph is just pure torture. Life is too short.

I am really surprised this isn't mentioned more in iPad reviews, especially since the reviewers are (kinda) long form writers! Maybe they are writing their iPad reviews on a laptop?

You can double tap and drag to immediately to start a selection with your finger. So if I wanted to select [this sentence] I would double tap on [this] and keep my finger down on the second tap, then drag over [sentence]. You can keep dragging to select a whole block.

I haven't seen this feature mentioned anywhere but I just discovered it one day for the same reason you are annoyed. The feature works on iPhones and iPads alike.

I have an iPad Pro and a Macbook Pro. Trying to force the iPad to replace the Macbook is like trying to replace a truck with a hatch back. You can do "most" of the things you need, but for some tasks it's a real chore and trying to make it work just leads to frustration. My iPad gets me 80% of what I need, but trying to grasp that last 20% ends up causing insane work arounds that just tarnish the whole experience.

"But PCs are still around. I’m not happy about this."

Would be nice to read why you are unhappy PCs are still around.

Though personally i don't see why one should replace the other. Their own dimensions, weight, power inside etc, limits or enables one device to do something the other can't. And touch is nice, but think you really need to be able to pair a mouse to your iPad to get a desktop feeling anyway. Then again, those are just my personal opinions about using iPad as a desktop.

For one, the constant going between mouse and keyboard forces too much context switching. Office keyboards also tend toward un-ergonomics.

Tablets are inherently worse from an ergonomic standpoint. The only advantage is the new horrible posture is different so it seems ok for a while.

PS: Humans need several inches of separation between their hands and where their eyes are pointing to be comfortable for 8+ hours a day for decades.

Very true, just trying to stub-in what he may have in mind.

At a basic level, IT really hasn’t disrupted the convenience of pen and paper. I can still do a lot more and much more quickly with pen+paper than a computer. Even more so a whiteboard.

Also backlit screens are awful.

What are some other traditional PC drawbacks?

How does a tablet fix that? The distance between touchscreen and keyboard is even further than between keyboard and a trackpad.

I try to address it by learning console based tools.

Mouse allows precision selection and clicking on text that no amount of keyboarding, touching, or apple penciling.

If I have a remote desktop type of task, there's no other reasonable way to do it than to click fast with a mouse, like I would type fast if it was a shell task.

> Mouse allows precision selection and clicking on text that no amount of keyboarding, touching, or apple penciling.

Ummm, good keybindings are better/faster than a mouse. E.g. were I writing this in emacs I could select 'keybindings' with C-r k RET C-SPC M-C-f; I could then copy it with M-SPC — all in less time than it takes to switch my hands from the home row to the mouse.

The thing I ask you to consider is a valid use case may exist for others outside how you use tech.

There's likely little question the vast majority of laptop users use a mouse or trackpad for their day to day.

From a power user perspective:

I'm not aware I can use those keybindings to select text in any iOS app and not just in a shell app?

I'm very well versed with keyboard shortcuts, type 100 wpm, and use vim regularly.

A mouse will always be faster for through administering GUI apps where there are settings screen with many dropdowns and checkboxes on every screen.

I log in to as many remote desktops and vms with a GUI as command line. I interchangeably work between Linux, Mac and Windows in a day.

Selexting text in any iOS app also can't be done by keyboard shortcut as far as I know. The mouse again provides the most precision, and I'm not a huge fan of it. The apple pen might be an admission of the need for precision on iPad for more use cases.

It wouldn't kill Apple to expose the mouse capability so I wouldn't have to consider a surface pro.

The iPad with a mouse would be amazing laptop for most.

> The thing I ask you to consider is a valid use case may exist for others outside how you use tech.

Oh, certainly. I find the lack of a mouse to be almost as insufferable as the lack of a keyboard.

> I'm not aware I can use those keybindings to select text in any iOS app and not just in a shell app?

There's no reason why iOS couldn't incorporate more-complex keybindings throughout, and it fact macOS does incorporate some emacs-like keybindings.

> A mouse will always be faster for through administering GUI apps where there are settings screen with many dropdowns and checkboxes on every screen.

Actually, take a look at customize[0]: it's a complete, mouse- or keyboard-driven GUI (yes, that includes buttons & checkboxes). It can be pretty nice to be able to C-s and interactive-search a GUI panel.

I certainly won't deny that a mouse or stylus is useful for precision GUI manipulation — I'm just noting that more can be achieved with a keyboard that typical 1984-Macintosh-derived GUIs attempt.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvihNaXANW0

This issue does not exist on notebooks though where keyboard and touchpad are so close. I didn't understand why vim users on desktop made it such an important point to never having to use the mouse until I tried on a keyboard+mouse setup, it didn't occur to me that reaching for the mouse is a problem because I mostly used vim on a laptop with touchpad.

It seems better on a laptop, but it's not ideal and there's still context switching.

I am curious about this as well. I would want a definition of PC as well, considering that part of the experiment is converting the tablet to what I consider a PC. All that's missing from the equation is a mouse.

Seems to me we're just quickly getting to the point of debating over the OS and software on whatever piece of hardware we choose to use.

I think he was saying he's not happy about PCs still being around because if they are that means he's lost his bet/his prediction is wrong. I can't tell. He meanders a lot, so I'm not sure if that's supposed to be connected to the introduction or if it's just a passing comment.

> Some of the worse experience I have is with email. Simply put, I cannot quickly select a large chunk of text and delete it. Selecting text on an iPad is infuriating. [...]

> The pain that is selecting text affects pretty much all applications where text is involved.

> Copy and paste is unnecessarily difficult.

I think this is the key issue. I love my iPad Pro, but deal with text—selecting it, moving the cursor, copying, pasting, has always always sucked. Even with a keyboard, even with the pencil and touch screen. I don't know why this is so bad, but I agree with the author, it is. In my eyes the pain of dealing with text is the biggest issue holding back wider tablet usage.

Text manipulation is easily my biggest complaint with the iPad. If Apple enabled mouse/cursor support, a good portion of the headache of using the iPad as a general purpose computer would evaporate.

Articles like this come up periodically. The big drag is that you are stuck doing development over ssh for the most part, which is why professional developers don’t really do this.

If your workload is more focused around “productivity” apps, you can use email, office, etc on an iPad mostly just fine, but text selection/manipulation becomes a problem.

I don't use it as my primary, but it's great for when I have to go visit the inlaws and don't want to bring my laptop gear. I keep a VPS specifically for doing this sort of work.

The apple keyboard is better than nothing, but I'm not really a fan. Plus I hate that effing emoticon key.

I love this idea in theory, but iOS is just not there yet, for me. Quoting a previous comment of mine on the subject:

I have one major thing that holds me back from considering iOS a viable replacement for a more traditional OS for daily computing: App and browser tabs are seemingly (not sure what is actually happening on a technical level) backgrounded if you switch away to a different app/safari tab. This results in the app restarting/browser tab reloading.

Perhaps this is some sort of caching behavior, and prior apps/tabs are ejected to make room in memory? Either way, it's very disruptive to have apps/webpages reload when switching back.

Until I can count on basic things, like my webpage to still be there if i open my laptop on a plane with no wifi, or my SSH session not to be logged out simply because i switched to a different app, iOS simply cannot serve as my main computing OS.

for SSH problem solution is mosh + blink

I'm happy to pay for good software, but 21,99 EUR seems a bit steep for a ssh client on a device I'd only be ssh'ing from when my laptop is for some reason not available to me...

I used panic's 'prompt' for a bit and also termius (which is free also also supports mosh) which were both tolerable.

Is it worth it? What does it do that the others don't?

Termius apparently does ssh port forwarding although I've never worked out how to use that feature properly...

I use an app called Shelly. Upgrading to “pro” cost 5€ and it supports ssh-agent, keys and all.

Blink is open source if you want to compile it yourself. I find it useful enough that I bought it. Plus I was too frustrated playing with certificates.

Prompt is ok but they seem to have stopped updating it. The main thing with Blink is that it uses mosh to maintain sessions over ssh. It can re-establish a connection after intermittent disconnects. If the app actually closes, I don't think it will handle that, but otherwise if the connection drops (due to the app being suspended), it will recover.

key management is nice, ssh config is nice (I use non standard ports frequently). Oh, remapping the Capslock to control is a big one for me. I can't find a way to do this globally on iOS, but blink will do it, and that is where I need it most.

that's mainly it for me. I can't remember if I tried termius or not.

From your description of usage I would say it's not worth it for you.

It is however completely worth it if you want to develop on iOS over SSH. Blink is the only one I've found that has (and can, due to Mosh being GPL) provide Mosh support on iOS, and Mosh is the only thing that makes developing over SSH on iOS tolerable for me for "real work", i.e. a full day's work and not just popping into a server for 10 minutes to configure something. Panic tried to make it work by having Prompt alert you before iOS backgrounds the app and closes the connection but it still means that you can't get up and run to the kitchen or bathroom without losing your connection or really delve into an article or documentation without having to re-foreground Prompt every few minutes. Running tmux/screen helps with any inadvertent disconnects, but Blink just lets you cmd-tab back and resume where you left off and is much less frustrating on spotty connections.

As an aside, Blink is open source and you can build and sideload it yourself pretty easily if you have a paid Apple Developer account. You can also do it on a free account, but you'll need to know a bit more about iOS dev to configure/disable a few things that you can't do for free. Personally after a year or so of that I just ponied up the money and bought the app store version.

It does seem to be related to available memory, and doesn’t happen as often on the iPad Pro. To be fair, desktop browsers are beginning to do the same, it makes sense to spare resources not in use.

What desktop browsers have you experienced this on?

I’ve been doing the same. The Smart cover keyboard is better than I expected, totally usable for programming.

I use Shelly as terminal app + a Linux VPS. I can login to my work’s VPN, carry keys using ssh-agent, and even develop html/css/js locally using Coda.

App switching is incredibly fast (even alt-tab works), and I find it much easier to spatially keep track of apps without overlapping windows. Split screen on the 12” is amazing. Battery life is better than what any laptop can offer, 2+ days of normal use.

My main disappointments are with external hardware: the Smart Cover actually causes smudges in the screen and leaves a very clear straight line where the keyboard folds. It also appears to double the total weight. The keyboard randomly disconnects if moved, and the Pencil charging position is just ridiculous.

What do you use for ESC? Escape for vi and Meta for emacs have been my stumbling blocks in this model.

Use control+c instead of escape for vim.

No, don't. They don't do the same thing.

The Blink app for mosh/ssh allows to remap caps-lock to esc on the SmartKeyboard. This made the iPad more than usable for (remote) programming in vim

In vim, I use CTRL+[. This should be mapped by default. Way better than the uncomfortable reach for the ESC key.

Shelly has a customisable keyboard extension bar at the bottom. And I use nano :)

For the 10.5" model, the smart cover adds 50% to the total weight (not double). I carry my 10.5 + keyboard in one of those 2oz ultralight backpacks from REI, so the total weight is well under 2 pounds.

I also use my iPad to ssh into a linux box and that is a remarkably nice working setup. It shows how much of iPads power and possible use is limited purely by the software, be it because of the App Store guidelines prevent certain apps or the apps not being there yet. Also the data exchange got much better with iOS 11, but still can be quite cumbersome.

Never heard of Shelly. I have always used Panic's Prompt. It has been a while since I reviewed iOS SSH options. Can anyone compare Shelly to Prompt? Or suggest other apps?

The pencil comes with a tiny double female lightning adapter which lets you plug your pencil into a regular lightning cable. It is on a card with a spare pencil tip.

They are easy to overlook in the packing material.

Ouch. I might have thrown that away...

The device is nice and the form factor is good for some people, but I wonder where people will draw the line in regards Apple dictating the way they use computers, now they will be at Apple's mercy to get software on these devices and it won't be your choice, I read people complaining about copy-paste but, is this really the big issue here? are you willing to sacrifice freedom for convenience?

The 12" iPad Pro is Apple's most amazing device. Ridiculously smooth to operate. So fast. And a great screen and speaker.

I'm using it much more than I've used any other iPad, probably more so than a laptop.

If it had proper XCode and a good SSH terminal, it would replace my MacBook Pro.

As it stands, it seems Apple is trying to keep the Macs their actual pro development platform.

For XCode, you'll have to tell Apple. But there certainly are a number of very good SSH terminals, my favorite one being Blink

I have two iPad Pro’s — a smaller one and the larger one (dueling personalized gifts that couldn’t be returned). I use the larger one at home, and when I’m walking around town or waiting for appointments or going to PT. I love using the smaller one when I’m traveling.

For 99.999% of my use cases, having mosh-server installed on my digital ocean server, along with blink, allows me to do what I want to do. For the other .001% of the cases, there’s usually safari. My only complaint is that it took me far too long to get comfortable with the “internationalized keyboard” button where the control button normally is.

I'm willing to bet that no future platform will succeed the PC unless it's an open platform. This automatically disqualifies the iPad. If the next bitcoin/bittorrent/app-store/web-browser-level idea can't run on your device without corporate intervention, it can only ever be a follower, not a leader.

Keyboards. To me a computer is a keyboard. It may happen to have a monitor attached. That's certainly a big feature.

I wanna to use iPad for development (so I can walk outside home and sit anywhere) but for the kind of development I do, I still haven't find a good setup.

I work with python, F#, html, sqlite, postgresql (plus mnay things more. MANY).

I will not learn VIM o Emacs. I have use both, I don't like them at all. I will be fine with nano if it were more robust.

I could use ssh, but:

- Need a good terminal editor, not VIM or Emacs, with good syntax highlight and light auto-complete. - Need to easy run/compile/build/etc. Is ok If I need to setup the comands myself but need a way to execute them easily on the editor.

And the most important thing is how I do sql? things like the psql are too bare, and my sql tend to be LARGE. Exist a terminal based "ide" for sql?

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I have Textastic, Pythonista, Prompt and a few others. None have the editor + terminal and way to create macros that run on ssh. I think Coda of panic have it, but no for the languages I need (F#, C#, etc).

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The other way is to run a HTML Editor (Maybe monaco of VS Code?) coupled with a JS SSH client and customize the iPad keyboard with the extra keys. I have tried several online IDES but none are made for this use-case!

The Galaxy Note 1 ended my use of the iPad as a tablet.

The iPad, however can't fully replace desktops until it can use a mouse.

Even being a heavy keyboard shortcut user, the mouse can't simply be touchscreened away. There are many tasks where the precision and speed of a mouse can't be beat, much like typing is faster than using the touchscreen keyboard (for most)

The software is there, but I'm not sure why Apple wouldn't expose the ability to use a mouse.

If tablet sales are plateauing/declining, maybe they can merge into laptops with bluetooth mouse access, which will never really go away.

Unfortunately Chromebooks (today's netbooks), or Android tablets even allow more to be done. It's a shame because iPads have so much horsepower.

The fun thing I'm looking forward to is using your iPhone/Android as the computer itself, attached to a laptop shell/dock. Apple has filed for a patent on this, and you can order a superbook from Sentio on the Android side, it's pretty slick and inexpensive.

> Unfortunately Chromebooks (today's netbooks), or Android tablets even allow more to be done. It's a shame because iPads have so much horsepower.

Exactly this. So much power, but so limited. I would much rather use my ipad pro than my android device, but the android device, which has pitiful specs compared to the ipad pro, is just as capable as a laptop.

Agreed. I'm grabbing a superbook dock from sentio so I can just use an android phone with 4 gb of ram to power my chromebook/netbook. Their sentio os app renders a fill android Gui and I don't have to maintain an extra laptop or tablet setup.

I'd really rather not use android, but between tasker, mouse support, and now the phone-laptop dock, along with creating the phablet category, android continues to out innovate Apple.

I've had iPhones for years and can't switch back. My macbook is good for what it does but today's pixelbook from Google might be interesting.

I use a 10.5" iPad Pro in place of a laptop, but I rarely do any development on it (that's what my desktop or my company laptop is for). Personally I find programming "on the go" to be really annoying and distracting anyways.

The portability, battery life, and LTE are huge advantages for the iPad.

I bought an iPad pro 10.5 + LTE in June, and after fixing a bunch of bugs in CoCalc.com (online coding, LaTeX, and data science), I have been pretty surprised to find myself using my iPad most of the time for backend development (for frontend dev, there is an app called "Inspect" that is kind of like Chrome dev tools). As the linked article says, copy paste is a big pain point.

What I like: speed, LTE, surprisingly good keyboard, screen nice to look at, light weight, battery life, excellent built in cameras, the new files app

What I don't like: websockets are disconnected in background tabs after about 30s, copy/paste sucks, lack of chrome dev tools, lack of a real Google Chrome browser (it's really webkit).

(Disclaimer: I work on CoCalc.)

What do you use as an input device? Surely not the screen.

I use the apple Smart keyboard (I would only use the screen in a pinch).

No ESC key Kinda kills emacs + ssh

I have been doing a similar experiment with the 10.5 ipad pro. I work in IT/sysadmin. I work in a mainly Windows shop, and have been leaving my laptop behind, and taking my ipad pro on service calls across campus. My biggest complaint is file/folder manipulation. I cant really access our network at all (I use Jump Desktop to remote to windows machines). As a temporary workaround I use my android phone, which seems to love browsing the network, downloading files, and even connecting to USB devices. I really, really want my ipad pro to be my "goto device" but its just not there yet. It may never be for me.

If staying within the Apple ecosystem is a requirement, this is about the only practical way to get a portable computer with a moderately large touch screen. If it is not, then there are many hardware options. The tradeoff of Mac for iOS is why this is a story and the absence of a similar tradeoff is why "My Surface Pro Experiment" would be a dog bites man headline.

I am not saying the tradeoffs here are or are not worth it. Just that the reason it is an experiment is because of Apple's decisions regarding its product line.

Having owned a couple, I’m no longer interested in the iPad form-factor until the devices are even thinner and are physically flexible.

A big rigid piece of glass that you have to baby does not sufficiently meld into the world so that you can use it unceremoniously without thinking about it. There’s still a conscious “I’m going to go on the iPad now”.

Call me when we can have 10 of them on the same desk, interchangeable, and sling them around like office supplies. The iPad is physically still in its awkward phase and we will be laughing at today’s form-factor in years to come.

Yeah, text selection alone would probably be enough for me not to do this. It's insanely bad on iOS, and you need to do it all the time if you write code. Constantly.

Being able to use a mouse would solve most of these issues?

Can you select text using Alt + Shift + Left/Right arrow? That's the way I do it on MacBook, but I don't have an iPad Pro keyboard.

Yes, you can when using the iPad Pro keyboard.

I never get these pieces...

I own a couple of different computing devices and they are just tools. Some fit a certain job better then others. Why limit yourself?

if you could code visually (like scratch) but with ability to also write code then I think coding on a touchscreen will take off. there are 100s of coding paradigms that could translate to drag and drop and for the rest you can switch to the keyboard.

Why not just use a Chromebook if you are going to limit computing environment intentionally?

Some reasons that I use my iPad Pro 10.5 instead of my Chromebook pixel, despite using a web browser most of the time:

- the ipad pro weighs 1 pounds; the chromebook weighs about 3.5 pounds - the ipad pro has much better cameras - the LTE in the ipad pro was much easier to get working and works better for me - my Chromebook pixel doesn't have a tablet mode or a stylus.

Sometimes I really wish that this ipad could just run ChromeOS though...

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