How the iPad's New Trackpad Works

From this video: https://youtu.be/hB1aP2OnUJA we can see it quickly gets to 100c and stays there despite ramping the fan up. So while a quad core that can turbo up to 3.5/3.8ghz sounds awesome, for heavy sustained performance it looks like it’s definitely going to be clocking down to 1.5ghz or so.

This isn’t a surprise to me but I think some people just see 3.5/3.8 quad core and think this is going to be right on the heels of the MBP 13

Also my first thought, but then I remembered the new monitor stand. The monitor attaches with magnets and by all accounts the movement mechanism works very well. Odds are they took what they learned there and applied it on a smaller scale here.

Then one day I saw a stock clearance offer and bought an Ipad because the price was so good it was a steal.

Then another day I added three pdf books to ibooks so I could read it on vacations, then three more, then ten, then twenty.

I also use it for note taking and sketches. The pencil and the ipad is an old model now but I love it.

Then I stated using it for programming with my own side loaded apps that connect with a big computer.

Then for minor things like controlling my 3D printers, for showing something to someone(work colleagues) you can do it while walking which is very useful.

So the thing only does three things for me, but in those things the thing is essential.

But, I really love our iPads for enjoyment purposes. Apple Arcade is a really nice gaming deal and you can pair Xbox/PS controllers. It's also obviously nicer than a phone for reading and watching things.

It's nicer than a laptop for reading some things, thanks to the option to switch to a vertical orientation.

The speakers on the iPad Pros are actually quite impressive as well. Not as good as the 2019 16" MBP (which are REALLY impressive) but they are very enjoyable for watching videos.

iPads are also nice for kitchen use - watching videos or looking at recipes. No worries about things getting into the keyboard, like with a laptop.

iPads are far from essential. I could easily live without one. But in our house they've finally carved out a very solid niche.

When writing this I wrote some phrases like "It's just not good at many of the tasks people use laptops for", then had to try and rewrite that a few times. The thing is there are a whole slew of tasks that sound like they are the same, but how and where you do them makes a huge difference. How you do them on an iPad is completely different to how you do them on a laptop, and that breaks some people's work flow or simplifies and streamlines otherwise very painful work flows for others. I use my iPad heavily for writing and scripting, but I do a lot of that on the train or in all sorts of ad-hoc situations where a laptop would be a real nuisance. Hence I don't use a keyboard case either. It works for me but absolutely would not work for a lot of others.

I don't own a personal laptop anymore. I use my iPad Air for video-editing, for Google Docs as well as for media consumption when I travel or when I'm at a coffee shop. It's so light that I can whip it out in 3 seconds, do stuff, and put it away. Because it's designed as a mobile device, battery usage is enhanced so I can use it all day without recharging -- else I can plug it into a small Anker battery pack.

You can do that with an MBA too, but that's a more expensive device plus there's just a little more fuss. Power consumption is higher so you are always hunting for an outlet and there's the added weight of an AC adapter (none with the iPad) -- though I suppose these days you can charge MBA's with a larger battery pack.

Caveat: programming doesn't work so well because the iPad (even with the keyboard/trackpad) has a "one-app at a time" interface, whereas with programming you need multiple windows open simultaneously. (iOS has a multi window interface but it isn't that great)

Before we had kids, I would get her hand-me-down iPads. I tried integrating them into my workflow, going as far as leaving my laptop at home for a week long trip where I would be working remotely (we had a small bluetooth keyboard even).

And I still couldn't find a good place for it in my workflow. When I need to type long things or write code, I prefer my laptop. When I need to do sysadmin work, I prefer my laptop. And for everything else, my iPhone is more than sufficient.

At this point the kids have taken over the last two hand-me-downs, so there is none left for me to try again. Eventually my wife will get an upgrade to her iPad Pro, and then I'll perhaps have access to a decent iPad again.

I'll try once again to add it into my workflow and see if there is a place for it, now that they've done a better job with synchronizing between Apple devices. I guess we'll see how it goes...

It's primarily a consumption device of which it's one of the most enjoyable to consume content in, so it's not going to be as appealing to creators, although it's starting to get used more with designers, writers and photographers.

I'll see the occasional post of devs attempting an iPad workflow with SSH and vi/emacs/etc but I doubt I'll ever see it as a general purpose dev device, maybe Apple can extend Swift playground to be useful for some limited GUI Apps composed mostly by dragging UI Components, changing props & writing little event code snippets.

But I really don’t see the purpose of buying a Mac for personal use. I have a work provided laptop, I mostly do “consumption” at home besides the occasional resume update with Word and some personal spreadsheets.

The iPad has better battery life than a laptop, instant on , built in cellular, it’s more consistently responsive and first and foremost, I can install any random crap trusting the sandbox and the permission system.

But as far as a “bigger phone”, having a larger screen is a godsend not to mention working with multiple apps at once and pip video.

I had the first gen iPad and it was just a bigger iPhone, the iPad has come a long way since then.

But for my mother, who has never touched, nor wanted to touch a computer, it has opened whole new worlds for her. She now loves that iPad and uses it for email, facebook, web browsing etc.

There are a whole lot more people out there like my mother than those who read hacker news.

If you've never felt the need for an iPad, you probably don't need one.

Obviously it's for people who want a bigger screen.

Any you'll get a MacBook Air where you're not allowed to run a significant part of productivity/development software and absolutely nothing that wasn't approved by some californian.

You're absolutely correct and i wholeheartedly concur with you on all this. i'd add Mac OS X (at least Catalina) to that as well, stuff like switching virtual desktops shows an animation and there's no way AFAICT to disable it.

Unless there's serious computation/data-transfer (including over a network) happening, i feel like computer user-interfaces really shouldn't have human-perceptible latency; and even then, only the specific component that's requiring computation/data-transfer should get latency'd, it's inexcusable for a whole system to get slow because one application is doing a lot.

> We need a completely new operating system with absolutely zero animations.

Whoa, there's a big gap between "there are too many animations" and "we need a completely new OS". There are a lot of good things about iOS that I'd hate to throw out with this bathwater. I'd much rather fix this problem than throw up my hands and start over.

(As to fixability—macOS, for example, let's you turn off animations for app openings, and I think iOS's "reduce motion", or whatever it is called, helps here, too—although I don't have an iDevice handy to test, [EDIT] and I see now elsewhere in this thread you aren't happy with it.)

It was a great device, save for the severely compromised Nvidia-SOC which made HD-playback only work sometimes. Such a let-down!

Had someone made a device like this with the specs of the Nexus 7, I would have bought it and replaced my Transformer in a heartbeat.

But nobody did, so now I’m back on my Thinkpad, and it’s actually really nice to run a OS of your choice, which you loaded on a machine you own, which isn’t actively fighting you.

Also I assume the iPad itself is coupled magnetically to the case/stand.

Sure. Because you didn't actually get the point.

The cursor actually transforms into the touch area. No OS today does this and it's definitely novel.

It’s because ios apps don’t have hover effects, so they use this to indicate you can click something.

> Like on a 20 years old Mac indeed.

Yeah, only this time around Apple will have you firmly locked in to their walled garden. What’s not to like!