iPad 12.9“ 2020 review (A PC user’s perspective)

mbrooksuk.medium.com

12 points·michaelbrooks··4 comments

Apple has done a nice job of adding a lot of power user functionality to iPadOS, and iOS in general, but discoverability remains a huge challenge.

Multitasking is a kludgy set of gestures and dragging things around. There aren’t great affordances that help less sophisticated users understand the system.

The only chance a new user has to discover the new obtuse gesture-based cut, copy, and paste system is a single dialog, shown once, that you are liable to accidentally dismiss. Oh, and don’t forget shake to undo.

Seems that one thing Apple could do to help is offer a truly interactive user guide, manual, or tutorial like those we used to learn how mice worked in the 90s (“Mouse Practice”) [1]. Hey, maybe even add it to Tips.app.

(Personally, for me, I’ve gone from an iPad productivity skeptic, to preferring using the iPad Pro w/Magic Keyboard for any computing task short of programming.)

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

I was a huge Apple skeptic before the iPhone 11, and decided to give the Pro a go. Much like yourself, I now use it for most of my productivity tasks. All of my blog posts are now mostly written on the iPad, and I love the pencil and magic keyboard. At first it seems overly expensive, but it is very much well worth the money if you can afford it.

It took me a while to learn 2 fingers on the screen is undo and 3 is redo, and that's really as much as I know for gesture control. The split screen is nice, but like you say, there's definitely room for improvement.