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Comment by Fiahil | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree with this article. The iPad hardware is absolutely wonderful, it's light, gorgeous and powerful. I got the latest iPad pro to watch Netflix in bed and it fills that purpose completely.

However, the OS running on the machine is bad. Very bad. The multitasking is horrifying. The Files app is unusable (especially if you want to access your files from an FTP server). You have to use your finger to select a textbox on the screen before you can use your physical keyboard. Copy/Paste between apps is a nightmare (mostly because of the really poor multitasking). Sharing your screen via Airplay is useless except for demoes (doesn't match the target monitor resolution, nor transform the iPad into a giant touchpad). It doesn't support multiple icloud/gmail accounts (if you want to share it with your SO). I can use a terminal and SSH to my raspberry pi, but I can't use git, bash, node, python, go or rust on it...

Just let met install MacOs instead, it can't be worse.

PS: even having a console-only ubuntu VM would make me happy at this point.

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My single biggest problem on the iPad is the way Safari just randomly kills your background tabs. Filling out a web form? You'd better hope that their half-baked tab state saving worked! (Spoiler alert: it probably didn't)

It's particularly annoying because of the headline features of iPadOS was that you could finally use Google Docs in Safari! It's actually amazing how well it works...until you switch tabs or apps and have to wait for your entire spreadsheet to reload.

Whoa, they do this on iPad? Is that a new iOS thing?

I have 500 tabs in Safari on my iPhone. It's a nice time capsule of what I used to be reading. (500 is the cutoff limit, apparently.)

The tab won't go away, but it will trigger a fresh http request (and thus any input in a form will disappear), I believe the behavior is the same on iOS for iPhone.

It’s identical and it’s aggressive. It’s more forgivable on the iPhone but I don’t reckon so on an iPad Pro.

Oftentimes I’ve been underground and I’d go back into Safari to read a page I already had open, but it triggers a new request with no internet connection and then blows up.

I would hope that at least the last open tab would be held in memory or otherwise heavily cached when the signal degraded enough to prevent a reload.

Yep, and it's really frustrating when the tab was just a static webpage with some text you want to read. It has the iOS baked-in assumption that you always always have fast Internet access.

Putting something into your Safari Reading List saves it for offline access. If you want to read a webpage later on mobile (and it won't parse through Instapaper/Pocket for some reason), that's probably the way to go, vs. leaving it open as a tab.

Though, admittedly, I never got it to work right at actually using the offline-snapshot versions of pages when I was, er, offline. Even though it clearly had them taking up space on the disk.

Shouldn't this be handled by website developers via PWA-related tools? Think about it, if you're website is meant to work offline (and safari cannot know this), you can implement the necessary code for it to work offline (e.g. web.whatsapp.com)

For me it's often something like a manpage I have had to find via Google. The web developer isn't thinking about stuff like that because it's a pure Web 1.0 static page that normally doesn't need anything like that.

Expecting the page to stay open until the tab is closed isn't normally considered to be "working offline". The main point of a PWA is being able to navigate offline, not just continue to exist.

The parent likely means background killed in the sense that iOS fairly aggressively removes loaded web pages from memory and replaces them with a screenshot and a url. Most of your 500 tabs are likely screenshots and urls. When you select them they fetch the page from the server fresh.

In most cases this is fine and frees up memory for other apps/tabs, but with web apps with local state, said state gets clobbered in a way that never happens on a desktop browser. Because it is fully automatic you can never really tell or trust that local application state will still exist if you tab away and back.

By “killing background tabs” the parent simply meant that Safari wipes loaded tabs from memory, so the tabs have to reload when selected again.

However, in rare cases if you’re foolish (aka me) you might:

1. Unintentionally open a new Safari window via iPadOS multitasking.

2. Unintentionally close the original Safari window with your 400+ tabs.

3. Lose 400+ tabs permanently.

I’ve learned the hard way to just use the Reading List.

This aggressive killing of background tabs/apps is due to the iPad’s notoriously low amount of RAM. They put less than the equivalent iPhone models for a device that is supposed to be for multitasking.

That applies to the cheapie iPads (not so much the Pros) but even then, there are times I’d rather deal with slowdowns and memory paging than actually losing my data.

The iPad Airs aren’t the cheap lineup, and they have less RAM too.

I feel that Apple has lost its way with OS design in the past 5 years or so. Not at a macro level, but at a micro, "little things" level. Launch anything Apple-written these days and you'll get a wizard telling you how to use some new widget - just like any other software by anyone else. I don't think Apple has ever done that before because features were designed so well, you can easily figure it out.

Then there are just tons of small decisions that are head scratchers. In iOS 13, they changed when Select/Select All appear, and it's a real pain in the ass. Early versions of iOS didn't have Select/Copy/Paste because the general belief was that they had to get it right the first time. They nailed it, but now they've tweaked it and made it much harder to use.

I agree with this - I feel like Windows has gotten much better at catering to delivering (or allowing other people to deliver) more targeted UX improvements. Once upon a time Fences was a requirement to be alive - now instant searching in the start menu means I hardly ever see my desktop - similarly universal key combinations (and global key capture) have let things like media keys really take off - being able to pause a video that skipped to the next entry in the playlist without ever backing out of a different fullscreen app is kinda beautiful.

Heck, I've got, and regularly use, an iPad and had no idea you could go into split screen mode - the UX is entirely invisible and un-intuitive - especially if you pick up something running older iOS and need to remember how to pull up the carousel.

How do you get search to work? For me, Windows Search Indexer just uses 100% CPU forever.

Oh sorry - I almost never use search in the context of documents - I use it for programs I need to pull up. I don't need a document search all that much as I generally store things by project and am only ever working on a modest set of files at a given time.

If you're looking for a good finding utility I might suggest grepwin[1] which does a great job finding things fast.

1. https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html

They never nailed copy/paste nor select on any form of iOS.

And undo is also terrible.

Itunes was utterly terrible. My iphone is terrible.

Apple make very, very bad software. And their hardware is overpriced. And they deliberately make people pay more for accessories like their pointless new audio port.

Android is superior in every way, except (I'm told) on privacy.

I cannot comprehend why anyone buys apple. I have to have apple for my work phone, and I hate it. Just today I was wrestling with their dreadful podcast app to try to figure out how to get it to play the podcasts in the order the episodes are enumerated in, which isn't the default. I still haven't found the 'playlist' part. Find in page on a web page took me ages to find. I cannot select the middle of a word. Their auto-correct corrects words that are nicknames or abbreviations by default to some totally inappropriate word. Their files app truncates the name, so when I download several episodes of a podcast, all of which have the format "long podcast name episode #" all I see is "long podcast name ..." eight times. Moving icons from one virtual page to another is clunky. The equivalent of a drop down where you have some weird rotating drum thing is awkward. Adding a contact from a text from an unknown number was convoluted. There are no timestamps on incoming text messages on the text app. On and on. Every single bit sucks.

And no I don't want to hear how I can "just do x,y,z, it's easy". Their software is not intuitive and sucks.

Today at least I got the audio jack to stop constantly disconnecting. The problem? Lint in the audio jack. Never had that on the old one but Apple couldn't charge me $10 to connect my existing headphones to their device so I guess it was worth it.

> Find in page on a web page First question is where the F is it, second question is why the F did they put it there?

Posts like these are very cathartic to me.

To offer a counterpoint, I found Android on a tablet to be a UX disaster. To be fair, I last tried it a few years ago, but it REALLY put me off. The iPad has confusing and unnecessary limitations, but Android on a tablet was inscrutable and inconsistent. It gave me so many ways to shoot myself in the foot, and burn up a battery doing nothing at all.

I think it has been way longer than that, it's just that they were (and many fans still are) in denial for a long time. But there were plenty of things about iOS that were non-intuitive from the get go.

Way back when, I got an iPad for my mom. She loved the idea of a device that basically doesn't need support, but it took a while for her to get the hang of it, and her main complaint was that it was "inconsistent and unpredictable". She pretty much had to poke at things to figure out what they do - the opposite of good UX.

She's on Android now, and happy as a clam.

Past 5 years? Maybe closer to the past 25 years. Ever since Apple decided OS X would be the successor to classic Mac OS. This is when Apple finally left their incredibly rigorous user interface guidelines behind [1] and made technical considerations (preemptive multitasking, multithreading, and virtual memory) the priority, along with “lickability.” [2]

The classic Macs were the last truly easy to use desktop computers. My father and all of my older relatives of his generation had no problems using classic Macs. OS X however? Completely baffled. Might as well have sat them down in front of a terminal connected to an old Unix mainframe. Yeah, it has a lot of superficial similarities to classic Mac OS, but it violates the principle of least surprise far too often to be called easy to use.

iOS is easy to use though. Hand an iPad to any of those same relatives and they get along fine. It’s way less powerful though, despite running on a computer several orders of magnitude faster.

[1] https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/maco...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/lickable-buttons/

As soon as they fixed text control, they broke URL handling. Long press on a link? Congrats, now you've got a weird floating popup Safari window with no Close button! Enjoy trying to use the finicky "drag between two invisible targets to open the app switcher" gesture to find and close the unwanted window.

The one that's been driving me up the wall lately is that I can't use screen sharing unless the iPad and the Mac are on the same Apple ID.

It really kills the value of that feature in a setting where multiple people who each own their own set of devices want to be able to work together more easily. Like, say, homes, offices and schools.

All of those are either kind of ‘eh’, or have decent workarounds, or aren’t even valid at all. There are plenty of ftp client and server apps that work absolutely fine, I don’t even know what your talking about on that front.

Please don’t add a mouse cursor to iOS, No!

I find the new cut n paste stuff outstanding. There are a range of decent screen sharing, presentation and touchpad apps. There’s a decent free Gmail app that supports multiple accounts.

Can’t use Python? Good grief, where have you been hiding all these years? Pythonista is a fantastic Python dev environment on iOS, with several apps and games published using it, and there are a bunch of other dev apps for other languages, plus Working Copy for git and github integration.

The iPad doesn’t do everything, sure, but it’s way beyond being a basic consumer device. In particular Pythonista, with its built in GUI designer, support for games development, community shell extensions and tools make it an incredible powerhouse device.

> Please don’t add a mouse cursor to iOS, No!

It has one! https://www.macworld.com/article/3405887/how-to-use-a-mouse-...

Please don’t add a mouse cursor to iOS, No!

I assume you're talking about iPadOS.

I use the new mouse support in iPadOS all the time, and absolutely love it when I'm using my iPad like it's a laptop computer at my desk. It's so much more comfortable and ergonomic than constantly reaching up and pawing at the screen.

Consider looking into iSH, it let's you access a Linux like environment where you can download and use common packages like vim and python in a terminal. It has to emulate x86 calls, but for my use case of writing notes in vim and compiling and running simple c++ programs, it works. You can see some more information here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ish/

But I completely agree that it's practically a moral crime that the OS is so locked down. Just a sandboxed native terminal would make this device my main coding environment. The cheap wireless keyboard and mouse I use with it makes the lack of a native terminal where I'd have complete control the one thing holding it back for me.

This can't be installed like a regular app, can it?

Also, I wonder why they emulate x86 – isn't the iPad CPU ARM64? Couldn't this simply use binaries for that architecture?

Then you’d be running unsigned, unreviewed binaries bypassing iOS controls directly on the CPU, which would be a security nightmare for iOS. This way it’s a completely emulated environment that’s isolated from the underlying system.

Running x86 binaries under software emulation, and forking off arbirary ARM binaries, aren’t the only two alternatives. You can do what Wine or gVisor does: run native-architecture code, but virtualize system calls as calls into the host binary.

You can't run arbitrary unsigned machine code on iOS. Interpreting it is the only solution.

Unfortunately, that slows things down with iSH a lot. iSH gives surprisingly complete Linux environment, complete with ability to install most of the packages you'd want. There's even an iSH folder in the Files app that gives easy ability to interchange files between iSH and the regular iPad environment. However, the emulation layer slows the Linux applications down quite a lot. Depending on your needs, though, might still be good solution for some things.

Millions of people use Android devices that allow sideloading, and it does not end up a "security nightmare".

Oh come on, security and privacy on Android barely exist at all except at the most general level. We're past the days when Samsung disabled all OS security controls on their flagship phone just to get the camera working for launch day, but Play Store apps are so infested with spyware and trackers the security of sideloaded apps is barely relevant.

It doesn’t support MMX emulation, which means I can’t get a Go compiler to run on it at the moment.

>PS: even having a console-only ubuntu VM would make me happy at this point.

If you're ok with that console running on a home Ubuntu workstation/server or cloud server, then the Blink.sh iOS app is great for this. ssh into your Ubuntu workstation/server from your iPad. Discussed at HN before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12932592

I'm using blink, it's the best alternative currently. It's just sad to have a powerful 2k€ machine, but working on a 10€ raspberry pi.

Working Copy and CodeHub handle git repos. I code from an iPad Pro sometimes with Blink (mosh/ssh client) and Working Copy with Textastic.

I sympathize about not running local dev environments, but for the actual work I do the apps won't run on a laptop or local PC anyway without a lot of trouble, so I'm used to working over ssh to a dev server. That works very well on an iPad, even better with a decent keyboard with an escape key.

As someone else mentioned Pythonista gives you local Python.

I work on multiple large web applications for a few clients and I've tried using my iPad Pro exclusively. I've only run into two issues that make it less than ideal: No web inspector/JS debugged in Safari (though workarounds exist they're clunky), and difficult text selection (not an issue in a terminal window with vim but imprecise and fussy in iOS apps). Otherwise it's great and I do use my iPad a lot. My main work setup is a Chromebook (Pixel Slate), which I only prefer over the iPad Pro because of the trackpad/mouse text selection and Chrome web developer tools.

I'm quite confused why you'd pursue attempting to use an iPad for development work. As someone who hates laptop-style thin keyboards I could justify it by the fact that carrying around a laptop and a keyboard feels more silly than an iPad and a keyboard - but the weight difference is pretty negligible and the software running on a laptop just has so much more utility for task switching (checking the kanban - making sure the VPN is up and running - quickly tabbing to chat to make sure you can disregard an @ mention) ... all these, on an iPad, require fully backing out with clunky key-presses to activate a very limited app switcher.

I’ve tried the iPad as a workstation off and on for many years (I had an original iPad). While I’ve never quite gotten it to work for me, I can still see the appeal. And for exactly the reason you state.

A full laptop is much better at task switching.

But when I’m working, and in a zone, task switching is the last thing I want to do. I want a distraction free workspace without widgets and notifications. On the iPad, this is so much easier to achieve. And if you have to change apps (and you have a keyboard), the app switcher is the same as on a Mac... cmd-tab still works.

I prefer to eliminate the task switching as much as possible rather than optimize it. I mainly use a Chromebook, always in full screen with one app window. I can switch windows with a keystroke. I don't need or want a bunch of stuff cluttering the screen.

I don't know why finding that other people have different work patterns and preferences would confuse you. I'm not "attempting" to use an iPad -- I've used an iPad and a Chromebook (currently Pixel Slate, also a tablet) for five years professionally. I used a MacBook before that. I'm old enough to remember hauling a VT-100 and an acoustic modem home to work on weekends a long time ago. I'm also old enough to remember people saying no professional programmer could use a personal computer, or a laptop.

I don't use Kanban or constantly switch to chat. I can see if my VPN is running by looking at an icon at the top of the iPad screen. I don't constantly task switch while working.

It has nothing to do with weight or feeling silly. I want to concentrate on one thing at a time, and I want a portable setup for working because I travel a lot.

An iPad developer setup won't work for everyone, but for the people it does work for it can work very well. 90% of my programming is done over ssh to remote servers, and the iPad can do that perfectly. The rest of my time is dealing with email, also fine on an iPad, or Slack, or reviewing PRs, which I can do right on my iPad.

Other developers have different requirements.

Also, Secure Shellfish does great at integrating SFTP with the Files app. (It doesn’t do plain FTP, though.)

I don't think HN is the target audience for the iPad. I have one and use it as a reading device.

Others use it for games and social media, where the many accurate deficiencies you point out don't matter much. The average person seems to use it within a narrow sandbox where it works. The minute you try to do something else with it, you'll struggle and be disappointed.

It’s the device of choice for most public company directors and senior executives I meet. I know of a few companies that issued them to their directors for board use. Senior investment bankers also use them extensively while traveling.

It’s the corporate lawyers and junior investment bankers that rely more on laptops (mostly for Word, PowerPoint and Excel).

Yeah a lot of the comments here just don't make a lot of sense to me. I use mine to read books, and watch TV/Movies when traveling. It's a consumption device, not a work device.

I guess where the confusion comes from is the iPad Pro, which Apple pitches as a device for creators. However, they've been pretty unambiguous about targeting artists, not developers. I don't think they expect anyone to start programming with an Apple Pencil.

I wonder how much those problems are related to the design of the OS or to commercial strategies.

I am under the impression to have a well designed base layer and apps. Then if I want anything more or different, I can use other apps that are secondary citizens with each their own isolated subscription/cloud/format strategy.

The ecosystem of free apps that you can find on desktops (mac, windows, linux) of reliable text editors, command line tools, syncing software ... seems to be missing.

I'm agree, problem in software, not hardware. I tried use Palm as remote terminal to my office servers before iPhone era and use iPhone and iPad later, but software progress looks like in 1990. This issue should be solved with new software, platforms like Animation CPU https://twitter.com/acpustudio

> I can use a terminal and SSH to my raspberry pi, but I can't use git, bash, node, python, go or rust on it...

Nothing of that is something I care about.

Pythonista, Continuous, Codea, Shaderific, Playgrounds, and a couple of others provide enough juice for my tablet coding needs.

How much Netflix are you watching!?

The file system if you use it is a god sent. You can share files, organised files ... not as good as lap top one but it is good enough especially if you have an macbook to arrange and tag files.

Why on earth should I need a separate device to organize the files on my device?

You don't need to, but doing so with a virtual on-screen keyboard is annoying and slow compared to using a separate laptop.

And there's the problem.

Or, y’know, we’re talking about the iPad Pro here, so use the keyboard cover. (Are there people buying an iPad Pro who don’t buy the keyboard cover? Seems silly to me.)

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