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Comment by goldcd | Hacker News Reader

I feel like some old fogey/luddite when I say "I've never seen the point of iPads" - or tablets for that matter. I've had a few and they're great as media consumption/browsing devices - but am utterly bemused when people say they do "all their work from them". I feel quite angsty enough when my laptop gets decoupled from the desktop-symbiotic multi-monitors and proper mouse and keyboard. I can see the point of a Chromebook - shoving Chrome into something cheap/efficient (if Chrome is all you need), but am eternally bemused over people trying to bolt keyboards to tablets - "you wanted a laptop"

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You are not a "luddite," you are a "laggard." There is a massive difference.

Luddites were against technology because of fears that society would wind up being worse off, and especially that they would end up starving to death.

Laggards are people who cling to their technology because it feels "good enough," and they do not perceive the benefits of staying so-called "current" outweigh the costs of adopting new tech.

Being a luddite is having a strong opinion about whether new technology is bad for society, and then acting to protect society (from your POV).

Being a laggard is having an opinion about whether technology new technology is a waste of time, and then acting or refusing to act to protect yourself from wasting time and effort.

You appear to be happy as a desktop user. No argument from me. If your rig makes you happy, who am I to tell you to spend money on a tablet and then re-learn all your habits?

As you acknowledge, not all new technology is better (for the desired application).

Most tech companies want to make money as their primary goal, rather than "make people's lives better with our tech".

As their goals in selling items are largely orthogonal to improving one's life calling someone a "laggard" -- which bears a slightly derogatory air -- simply for not buying in to a tech company's latest money acquisition effort seems, well, strange.

Perhaps "discerning" is a better description.

The parent poster is neither a luddite nor a laggard. They are an informed consumer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consumer

I mostly agree. I'm a condensed matter theorist and though I do some numerics, most of my time is spent doing handwritten math. It's the handwritten math that the iPad pro really excels at. I absolutely love writing on it and as a pretty disorganized person, I'm sure that if I didn't have an iPad there is absolutely no way I'd still have notes and calculations I wrote 6 years ago. Not only do I still have all my old notes in a quite organized form but they're actually searchable with in-app handwriting analysis. Not only that, but I can edit, resize and move my text very naturally on an iPad in way that are just impossible with pen and paper.

Because my iPad is so pleasurable to use for the things that its good at (media consumption and handwriting for me), I always feel so tempted to just get rid of my laptop and move over completely to my iPad but it honestly just isn't as good at keyboard centric tasks as a laptop is.

I feel the iPad's real strength is in the intimacy of the experience so its really great for handwriting, looking through photos, reading books. It really gives a stronger feeling of connection to whats on the screen than a laptop or desktop can in my opinion. But it still has a long way to go before I’d use it in anger for programming

I second this. Using the new apple pencil’s are quite amazing in terms of how natural it actually feels. I use it constantly for communication at work and idea exchange.

I’m an electrical engineer and I also do the initial design with pencil and paper and only skip over to CAD once I have the design space understood. But I do everything in paper notebooks and old notebooks do get lost and/or damaged (or they’re somehow always in the wrong location), so I’m curious what iPad apps you use for notes and handwriting recognition as maybe they could work for me too. Can the handwriting recognition software understand mathematical equations too? That would be amazing.

So currently there are two dominant iOS apps for handwritten notes: GoodNotes[1] and Notability[2]. They have much more features in common than they do that are different but there's enough differences that some have strong feelings one way or another.

Neither app can recognize math unfortunately (sounds like a very hard thing to support!) but both recognize handwriting. Notability in my opinion has a much more pretty UI and has infinite scrolling (scrolling down to the bottom of a page just brings you continuously onto the next page).

On the other hand, GoodNotes has

* More levels of folder nesting, a feature one only truly appreciates after a few years of collecting daily notes.

* More control over the 'background' of your note. You can upload whatever PDF you want, with whatever proportions and use it as your 'paper', and you can have notes where the background paper changes from page to page

* Inking that I like a bit more. It's less pressure sensitive than Notability is which I think makes my writing look a bit more uniform. This one is completely up to taste.

There's more to the differences but if you decide on an iPad I'd recommend getting both apps and seeing which you prefer. I started with Notability and switched after 4 years. I like both but find GoodNotes works better for me these days. They're relatively cheap (cheaper than nice a physical notebook) and both allow for a variety of cloud storage options which is great. I can't recommend an iPad Pro enough for anyone who does a lot of math with pen and paper.

[1] https://www.goodnotes.com

[2] https://www.gingerlabs.com

Thanks. I’ll give them both a shot. I was recently given an iPad Pro and I was wondering what I was going to do with it. :)

Yeah honestly I don't get it either. So many simple things like for example, quickly opening 8 hackernews links on the front page in a new tab for future reading takes me about 5 seconds. On an iPad you'd have to long-press and open in a new tab, it'd probably take me half a minute.

It's stuff like that which kills even a browser experience for me because a lot of my browsing is navigation and exploration, e.g. on HN or Wikipedia, rather than pure-reading on a single page for 30 minutes which is nice to do with a light Pad on the couch.

Being able to organise a mini-session of 20 different wikipedia links with small tidbits of information relating to a central topic of interest, opening and closing them and switching between, is just so much easier on a Macbook with monitors, mouse and keyboard.

Hell even typing this comment is trivial on a keyboard.

> eternally bemused over people trying to bolt keyboards to tablets - "you wanted a laptop"

That's right. I want an iOS laptop. A Bluetooth keyboard with an iPad Pro is just about perfect for me.

It all comes down to what applications you need to run and the hardware that supports it. I have a laptop that I'm using for Ruby on Rails right now (just learning it). But it doesn't run Procreate or support anything like the Apple Pencil. So for that application, the iPad is perfect. I have a Kindle Paperwhite that I read on. I used to have a Windows desktop that I would play games on, but now I do all of that on a PS4. These are all different computers for different things.

I think that pretty much sums it up. "Horses for courses" - or "There's no one perfect device, nor should there be" Occasionally something disruptive comes along, and maybe a few users split across the gap - but doesn't negate the previous devices.

I use my iPad as a YouTube / Netflix machine. I'm very happy with it for that purpose. I also don't understand who would make their tablet their primary work device, or even a secondary or tertiary work device.

  > I also don't understand who would make their tablet
  > their primary work device, or even a secondary or tertiary
  > work device.

You called?

I carry my iPad Pro (previous generation) + Apple Pencil + Smart Keyboard Cover to all kinds of meetings. I take notes with the pencil, can look up anything I want in Trello, G-Suites, Confluence, &c. ...

It is wholly inadequate for coding, but I'm with the late Steve Jobs on that. Laptops—even Apple laptops—are pickup trucks. When I want to haul stuff around, I use my pickup.

But it's amazing how much of my job is concerned with words and people. You don't do words+people with a pickup truck. Ok, the metaphor is strained, so I'll just say that when I'm using my words with people, the iPad Pro is a very good tool for augmenting my memory and my words.

YMMV.

p.s. There is something amazing I have noticed ever since I got a Toshiba Portegé Tablet PC decades ago: If you are talking to someone, the laptop screen is a wall and a psychological barrier.

A tablet reverses this. No wall. Also, less privacy for taking notes. But that can be a plus, it implies that you don't have some secret agenda. I think that's something in favour of a tablet, regardless of whether it's an iPad or some origami-like device that is a tablet or a clamshell depending on how you fold it.

OK. So a tablet makes sense for people who are effectively telephone sanitizers.

I am not familiar with this term, "telephone sanitizer," but I suspect that it has a dismissive aspect to it, much like the term "soft skills."

I am a principal engineer with a very successful technology company. If being good at my job is accomplished via telephone sanitization and/or soft skills, so be it.

I don't care what you call me, just don't call me late for dinner.

It's a reference to https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_....

I'm not quite understanding the relevance, but that's ok.

To give an example that I hope is perfectly clear, I contend that for me, a tablet is a better device to take when interviewing a candidate than a laptop.

Interviewing candidates is not my only job, or 50% of my job, or anything like that. But when I do interviews f2f, I take my iPad, not my Macbook.

there seems to be zero relevance, hopefully he can explain further. i totally agree with you, most work meetings i attend demand proper attention and being on a laptop (even if taking notes!) could be seen as rude.

being a forgetful person, i've had to balance the optics vs. being able to remember meeting contents :) maybe a tablet is in order...

> there seems to be zero relevance, hopefully he can explain further

There's no explanation required. Given the context of the quote, that person was simply being condescending and dismissive.

Effectively, it means "I deem what you do and how you do it to be lacking in worth, therefore you must be a waste of space in the same manner as the worst of the Golgafrincham race".

Very good point, was talking about that with a friend of mine a few weeks ago as well. He was telling me the exact same thing, when dealing with people an iPad is much less intrusive and creates a more relaxed setting than a laptop would.

Using an iPad for work is kind of odd. If you mostly just need to do things like read, browse social media, and send emails you can use it like a tablet and then prop it up when you need to type. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, you can ssh into a "real" computer, prop up the iPad, and then use vim on a keyboard without needing to touch the iPad. There's this uncanny valley where if you need to do a mix of typing and touch navigation it's really awkward, but if you just need to do one or the other it's actually workable.

I mean I don't use one. The keyboards are awful and the system is ridiculously locked down when you start thinking about iOS as a desktop rather than a phone OS. But I can see how it would work for certain people.

How are “the keyboards awful”? If you don’t like the standard keyboards specifically meant for iPads, just use any a Bluetooth keyboard.

how is carrying an ipad and a bluetooth keyboard around easier than a small laptop that has so many more uses?

I don't have one but after trying out the iPad with the new apple pencil I can see it being more useful in a lot of situations where drawing is more useful than typing. and having a passable keyboard built into the cover should be sufficient for most people. now if you absolutely can't live without a bluetooth keyboard it might be a bit more cumbersome but the benefits that the pencil bring should outweigh that.

When I’m travelling, I don’t necessarily want “so many more uses.” Being constrained to e-mail and simple editing, together with the iPad’s small form factor and extreme mobility, can be more productive than lugging around a laptop. (I use a laptop most of the time. But depending on one’s workflow, an iPad + Bluetooth keyboard at the hotel room can be a productivity boost.)

Your flaw is in assuming that tablet + keyboard == laptop. Tablet + keyboard is way better than a laptop in some contexts, way worse in others. Imagine being an illustrator that also does a lot of communication with clients over email. Imagine being a blogger that writes articles but also touches up photos. Imagine being a mobile software developer, writing and testing code on the same device. Hell, even mobile websites are a huge market today and they're all interacted with via touch, most mobile web developers should actually be moving to tablets for testing.

About half my workday is spent following slide decks, reading PDFs or other documents, or answering email or Slack. At that point, being able to walk around with the iPad is much more comfortable.

When I have heavy creation to do, I use my desktop.

As a desktop user, that's how I feel about using a laptop! ;)

Previous gen iPad Pro + Smart Keyboard cover + Google Cloud has pretty much freed me from carrying my MacBook Pro when I have to travel.

Other answers already covered email, slack, jira, etc. iPad is great for anything that’s more text or equal parts reading/writing.

Where GC comes in, is when I need bigquery or to actually work with code, I can do a lot via the browser and for the full power just need to SSH into a box in the same project. Cloud shell can be used in a similar manner with Vim and tmux. I just need more than 5GB of disk usually.

I’m actually evaluating ChromeOS as a possible replacement because of the Linux app support and better support for the GSuite, so this article is an interesting read.

Same here, I don't understand people trying to shove work processes on entertainment devices.

I love my iPad Pro for several purposes -- media consumption, some light gaming, reading, managing media / bookmark / book collections -- but it would never occur to me to code on it (even through shells to Linux).

I am not fully comfortable even with my MacBook Pro. I am working on building a work process that doesn't rely on a mouse or a touchpad and then I could work on the MBP full time (mostly involving memorizing shell and editor shortcuts, and making a lot of shell aliases).

Before that there's simply no point -- it's like trying to run with weights on your ankles.

It would be perfect for Civ6 though..

I would be very okay with that. The iPad Pros have amazingly strong hardware, it's kind of wasted on anything but games and professional photo/video editing software.

it is perfect for civ 6.

As a theoretical physicist, the iPad can handle work-related tasks that the MacBook cannot (and vice versa). The unique iPad features mostly center around the Pencil: annotating papers, and doing "pen-and-paper" math, except that the iPad is far superior to pen and paper (you can move things around and "re-edit" them). Actually, the iPad can handle most things the I generally prefer the MacBook for (programming and writing, mostly), but there's usually some hoops to jump through. But it's certainly good enough that when I travel, I usually only take the iPad.

My scientist brother tells me the same and I am inclined to believe you and him. I realize the pencil helps you guys -- he annotates a lot and regularly uses the pencil instead of his fingers. I kind of implied programmers only in my comment which wasn't accurate. Sorry about that.

Mhm, I guess its a pretty niche thing but it always kinda annoys me when people say its not a real 'Pro' device. For writing math, there's no real competition against tablets from laptops or desktops.

Not only is the editing experience amazing (which is super important as in physics I probably write more incorrect things down than I write correct things), but it makes organization painless. I never had the discipline to keep paper notes in tidy binders and put them back after I take them out.

There's no way I'd have as good access to my six year old notes if they were written on paper, especially considering that now they're all backed up to the cloud and my app has handwriting recognition (only words, not math unfortunately) so they're quite searchable.

There’s a lot of people who aren’t developers. Personally I use iPad as a secondary work device when I don’t want to carry the MBP.

Agreed. I made a bad assumption, sorry.

Does the iPad pro run Xcode?

It currently does not

Sad

It does run a full Python 2 and 3 IDE called Pythonista, including support for making graphical applications, debugging, and even running a limited shell called StaSH with a bunch of PyPy versions of a typical POSIX userland.

There are other IDEs for other languages, too, although Pythonista is the star at the moment.

So it's not as though programming, even graphical using UIKit, isn't possible just because there's no Xcode.

Sounds nice.

My problem is just, I only use Macs because of iOS development.

I don't expect that'll ever change.

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