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Comment by guptaneil | Hacker News Reader

These types of posts are popular on HN and generally suggest that people are bad at realizing when a product wasn't designed for them. It's a bit like complaining that a drill should have a flat back so you can also use it as a hammer. Sure, it might be technically possible, but not only will it never be as good as just using a hammer for the job, it would make the drilling functionality worse.

If you're trying to use your iPad as a Mac, you will always be disappointed and rightfully so. These are distinctly different form factors with different primary inputs, and they should focus on what they excel at.

Adding keyboard and trackpad support to iPadOS wasn't to help us developers move to an iPad, it was to help people whose only computer is an iPad fill in some missing gaps in their workflow.

However, if you're planning to attach a keyboard to your iPad most of the time, just get a MacBook Air instead. On the flip side, if you're getting an iPad Pro, you should really be planning to buy the Pencil with it to take advantage of its strengths. Otherwise, you are probably looking for a consumption device (iPad Air or iPad no-adjective), but then you shouldn't be surprised that it doesn't help you create.

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I am actually genuinely curious of what is the use case for doing coding or advanced video editing on an ipad rather than a laptop. Like why do you need that level of mobility? To edit a movie on the toilet seat of a plane? I get the hacker toying mentality of "it would be cool if I could run Doom on my washing machine's LCD". But is there really a market for it?

Actually - the more I think about the question the more I realise that I don’t want an iPad to do laptop tasks - as a designer I want the interface connection that comes from Pencil + touch interface on my MacBook Pro...

This is the failure in vision of sidecar, of seeing windows from one device appear in the dock of another (mainly just Safari and Mail, practice), of cut/paste between devices.

Really you want to be able to casually use your iPad as a kind of input device to the Mac sometimes. Also to pick up a task you’re engaged in on one device and continue in another, back and forth. I started this comment on an iPad; as it has turned out to be more than one sentence I should be able to finish typing in the Mac (a much better experience), pressing “reply” on either device and continuing on.

To channnel Conways’s law: Apple’s flat yet strictly siloed corporate structure makes things like this almost impossible.

I spend so much of my personal time in my iPad that when I am doing personal research on my laptop, at least once a month I try to poke the screen with my finger (never happens at work, different context)

I’m still a little surprises as MBP having no touch interface. Another option would be if the touch pad and the touch bar were fused into one product, allowing a bit of pencil interaction

Microsoft fills the niche nicely for a full operating system with first-class pen and touch support.

Yep, with inferior pen support and slow devices.

I know a surprising number of non-tech people editing video for their youtube channel on their phone. Some of them have upgraded to an iPad (usually an older model to save money).

For coding ATM I agree it seems silly to me but apps like Codea are trying to make it possible and I suspect lots of kids have been given iPad not not general computers by their parents

Video and photo editing has certainly been pushed by Apple and its software partners as a use case for the iPad Pro, so we can leave it aside as its not enthusiasts and hackers asking for it in this case.

That leaves programming. And programming is possible on iPads in terms of writing code - even with detachable keyboards now, its only compiling it which is not possible due to Apple's restrictions. It seems fair to ask why.

But my question is: if you must attach a keyboard, aren’t you better off with a laptop? And if you don’t use a keyboard, is anyone really doing any meaningful coding on an ipad with touch only? And if so I’d be curious why?

It doesn't need to be as good as a laptop, it just needs to be good enough to avoid having to also bring along a laptop.

If you’re bringing a laptop presumably you can simply leave the iPad at home. IMO, laptop + phone covers most use cases for iPad + keyboard just fine.

Plenty things a laptop is not as nice for as the iPad. And even comfortably replacing it assumes your laptop is similar in size and weight than the iPad, which puts another constraint on your device choices.

I’ll just pack a Wacom tablet too so I can draw and write on my laptop and leave my iPad at home then?

For Windows you just need a laptop that supports the pen protocol. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/com...

For Apple you might need a Wacom tablet.

I used to have a Surface, it’s fine if you want to doodle occasionally but it really doesn’t measure up to an iPad for its overall tablet experience

There are better alternatives to an old Surface.

Sure, and the 2020 iPad Pro is better than the 2016 iPad Pro that I switched to initially. The problem on Windows’ side is the software. Unless Microsoft has found a way to get developers on board with their own modern UI paradigm, you get a good tablet experience maybe 10% of the time.

And their tablet friendly UI sucks even when Microsoft does it themselves. For example, the new disk manager, which is objectively worse in every way than the old one except for having big touch targets: https://mspoweruser.com/this-is-the-new-windows-10-modern-di...

Sorry for the late reply, but I'd say if you can attach a keyboard and do more of the tasks that a traditional laptop does, it can replace the traditional laptop. Then you have one device where you can pop off the keyboard when you are on the couch, and pop it back on when you are at a desk or need to do some typing.

Not my taste, I still prefer the traditional laptop form-factor, but Apple is actively pushing their (expensive) keyboards so its worth asking why not allow compiling of code.

In terms of video editing.. its not about portability, its about ease of use. A friend of mine edits videos on her iPad for 2 reasons. The first is that there seem to be more easy to use video editing apps there than on Windows, and she found one she liked (by testing them on her phone). The second is that the video editing performance is actually really good compared to what you can get with the same money in a Windows laptop + editing software. So getting an iPad mostly for video editing was an easy decision for her.

For me, I love the video editing part. Allows me to easily edit videos on trips to share with family and friends. Works much better than on a phone and requires a lot less hardware than a laptop.

A giant multi-billion dollar market for it already exists. There are several major apps used by world-class producers and famous creators.

Music and video production has rapidly adopted tablets not just because of the speed and mobility but also the accessibility and tactile nature of the experience. Not everyone needs to sit in front of a big workstation to get things done, and in fact much of the work that used to be done that way didn't have any other alternatives until now.

Programming is arguably harder to bring around because it requires a keyboard and screen real estate but most visual/design/creative work can easily be moved to iPad and opened up to many more people.

Perhaps the reason is as simple as, "this is what I own, and I'd like to use it."

I think the situation is almost the inverse of your question, actually. :) The article's author already does almost everything on their iPad; so the use case is as simple as "I want to move that one last thing (coding) off my laptop and onto my main machine (my iPad)".

I once had a programming assignment for a job interview. I was given a CSV format file sample and asked to submit a custom compression program. I went with creating a symbol dictionary for some fields, variable length encoding for some numerical fields, etc. I wrote it on my iPad using Pythonista mostly during my train journeys to and from my job at the time, with a bit at coffee shops during lunch.

> But is there really a market for it?

I think there was until the m1 air. My iPad pro is powerful and very portable. The only thing holding it back from being my complete on the go machine was lack of software around coding.

Now that the m1 air has come out, I will likely stop using the keyboard with my iPad, and just use the air on the go. The iPad will go back to my drawing and photo sorting/editing device.

There are still great use cases for an ipad. My two favorites are browsing the web or reading books from a bathtub and watching movies when travelling!

Do you use it in a zip-loc bag like bezos does with his kindle? I’ve wondered if that works.

No, the ipad doesn’t mind a few droplets of water. But you need a “book cover” like ipad case [1], that you can hold with one hand by sticking the finger between the ipad and the cover part of the case, so you hold it firmly with very little effort.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/JETech-Apple-10-2-Inch-Model-Genera...

FWIW, there are waterproof Kindles now.

While I can't run my programs on the iPad, Textastic + Working Copy + Blink (using mosh to connect to a VPS, or a work/home system if you have one to connect to) makes for a pretty pleasant coding experience so long as your code is not graphical in nature (none of mine is). I can run it on the VPS, or have a CI platform take care of running the tests and builds for me.

What was it that substantially changed from the old air and the m1 air?

Seems to me that most workflows that work on the m1 air worked on the old air but at a bit lower performance. I don't get what work you did on the ipad pro that could not have worked on the old air unless they required the pencil or touchscreen which the m1 air does not have anyway, right?

Not just a bit slower. My iPad Pro (and from I’ve seen now the new MBA) roll through programs like Lightroom. LR on my 2018 iPad Pro worked much better than LR on my 2017 MBP for example. Then there’s battery life which means not looking for a charger constantly throughout the day.

Lightroom is not supported on m1 macs.

It was literally shown running at the WWDC event, and the ARM version should come out in December. I expect it to perform more like the iPad version than the mbp version.

I don't understand - Adobe claims it's not supported and promised a version some time next year.

Why would it perform more like the ipad version? They are different apps.

What if you just want to use your computer while in bed or on the couch? It's so much more comfortable. Laptops are awkward and desktops just aren't made for it.

Here's another perspective - The ipad in my developer eyes is a powerful computer. It can do much more than just people use it mostly for - reading books and gaming. In fact, I'm using an iPad air right now and feel held back by the limitations of iOS imposed on me as a developer. I can't write code on an iPad (reliably). The machine itself is capable, so is the OS, but the narrow use cases Apple wants to portray it for gets in my way.

In fact, I was so frustrated, I was even looking at some alternatives. The only thing that gets closest to what I want is a Surface Go - a full fledged windows computer that can literally do everything I want (SSH, Coding, etc) I would switch instantly in a heart beat. But, the longer term consequences of an ecosystem switch pull me back. I'm invested in the Apple ecosystem heavily at this point and would much rather have something from Apple that also covers developers' use cases. I'm sure even Apple employees doing programming would like to see something like that. But, Apple needs to listen to make it happen. And they don't. Hence, such posts. At least, that's what I can infer.

P.S - I'm far from an Apple "fanboy". I'm a developer first and use whatever helps me achieve my end goal.

This isn't "another perspective". It's the exact perspective the GP is addressing. You're looking at the iPad product family and saying "I want to use this for things other than the intended purposes."

Yes, the hardware is there. But that's not relevant. Apple wanted a product that provides users with a mobile display--that's all iPads really are.

> In fact, I'm using an iPad air right now and feel held back by the limitations of iOS imposed on me as a developer.

There are no limitations imposed on you "as a developer". Apple didn't build a full-featured computer in iPad form and then said "Okay, now let's remove functionality to make it harder to code". Apple defined the needs of the product--a big screen and an easy touch-based interface--and built it. Sure, the hardware might able to do more, but it was never the intention for it to do more. It does exactly what it was designed to do.

The only limit imposed on you is the tools you're allowing yourself to use.

> Apple didn't build a full-featured computer in iPad form and then said "Okay, now let's remove functionality to make it harder to code".

But that is exactly what they did. (And they didn't even remove the functionality, they just outlawed it by policy.)

They explicitly built a computer, marketed it and sold it as a laptop-replacing computer and then got all upset when people tried to use it like a real computer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0P0FQ770dE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI-iJcC9JUc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09_QxCcBEyU as examples

> Apple didn't build a full-featured computer

That's exactly opposite of what they did. Go watch the iPad announcement videos again. They're pitched as computer replacements. Especially the iPad pro. Hence the parent comment and hence the OP's post.

It’s a computer replacement for millions of people — just not people like you. That isn’t a bad thing.

Apple has methodically added features to move it up the stack in terms of complexity. It takes time to do that without sacrificing what makes an iPad an iPad.

>Apple wanted a product that provides users with a mobile display--that's all iPads really are.

Or that they can interface with primarily with touch/a pencil. The iPad arguably started out as you described (plus some gaming). But it definitely can be used by creatives who don't primarily input using a keyboard. (And I know writers who use iPads on the go; I've never been able to make it work for me that way.)

> But it definitely can be used by creatives who don't primarily input using a keyboard. (And I know writers who use iPads on the go; I've never been able to make it work for me that way.)

It can be used by them, sure. But the matter is whether they are the intended audience, and whether their needs are a target for the iPad teams at Apple.

For a comparison, I can use my typical-sized Nikon camera to record videos, but I shouldn't expect Nikon to make a headband mount for it so I can record while I'm biking. I'd buy a GoPro for that. And similarly, I won't expect GoPro to include the same levels of customization and settings as a traditional camera.

Look at iPad ads or just Apple's website. It's pretty obvious it's aimed at people using them for creating art, photo editing, etc. In fact, I'd say that Apple does not especially emphasize using them for passive content consumption.

I'm not much of an artist but apps like Procreate and GarageBand are very clearly in the iPad's sweet spot.

> In fact, I'd say that Apple does not especially emphasize using them for passive content consumption.

Though that might just be social desirability bias: they know damn well that people are going to watch netflix all day, and only a few people will create. But you make customers feel better when you appeal to the latter.

Exactly. There's always a layer of apprehension when buying an accessory device because you know it will always be beholden to either your other computer or some third party service for certain functions. If I needed to, I could use a Surface or even one of the old Bay Trail windows tablets to cut together and burn a DVD for one of my technically-inept relatives. Ipads can't. They couldn't even access generic flash drives until last year.

Any device that can't make its own reinstallation media feels like using a house of cards.

I actually get the desire for convergence between the tablet and laptop. After all, the hardware is basically capable of both roles, potentially ergonomics aside (I haven't encountered a removeable keyboard that really works like a laptop does which I often use on my lap).

At the same time, it may be worth observing that tablets took off when Apple basically threw out laptop compatibility and made tablets their own (well, phone-related) thing. So convergence would be interesting but I don't want them to de-optimize either the tablet or the laptop to do so. (Though I expect they'll get there at some point and have no doubt they're experimenting internally.)

>> I actually get the desire for convergence between the tablet and laptop. After all, the hardware is basically capable of both roles, potentially ergonomics aside.

This is why there are "two-in-one" laptops that have fully functional touchscreens that convert to tablet mode for both Windows and Chromebook operating systems.

>> Apple basically threw out laptop compatibility and made tablets their own (well, phone-related) thing.

Thus this article begging Apple to reconsider. Wouldn't it be awesome if the M1 Macbook Air had a fully functional tablet mode that let it act as an iPad Pro? :)

For whatever reason Apple does not think so. :(

> For whatever reason Apple does not think so. :(

I think it's coming... I assume it's more of a software challenge than a hardware challenge (i.e. the convergence of iOS and MacOS without it going the way of Windows Tablet Edition).

> I haven't encountered a removeable keyboard that really works like a laptop does which I often use on my lap

The magic keyboard works really well for this. It’s not perfect, but it’s so close that I can forgive the flaws.

For programming I keep meaning to get around to testing code server. It would require using another computer or server to actually run it, but since vscode is essentially a browser app anyway I think there’s a decent chance it might be usable for the few times I’ll want it (wanting to work somewhere other than my desk once in a while).

The iPad Air already does everything I bought it for so it’s not a major sticking point for me, but it would be interesting to see what the hardware was actually capable of as I think my use cases (reading, video, drawing/notes, midi, teams/other chat) are barely pushing it. However I think it would require Apple to open up the iOS ecosystem, which they seem pretty hell bent on not doing (for some reasons I agree with and a lot I don’t).

I agree mostly with your theory of iPad, but I believe it is Apple Product Marketing’s job to lay that out very clearly, if not explicitly, but they have not in my opinion. The messaging about “Pro” iPads makes the platform aspire to replace your Mac, but in practice I see iPad as a field computer for environments where a Mac is simply inappropriate.

> it is Apple Product Marketing’s job

Actually, Marketing's job is not that.

The job of marketing is to tell half the story, and that is the favorable half.

If marketing is selling a pickup truck, it should tell you that it can carry stuff in the bed, more than before and it will be easy for you to carry it.

They won't say people rarely carry stuff in the bed, that you should really rent a truck when moving a refrigerator or moving your house, and that a sedan is more practical.

They should not open their mouth, unless it is to say you are really a pickup truck person and your dreams are tied up in this pickup.

And Apple clearly pitches the iPad towards creative types, not just consumers, but mostly draw rather than code or otherwise type. (And they don't emphasize that you probably can't begin to draw like all the artists effortlessly doing so in their ads :-))

My experience as a pro artist is that it takes about five years of directed practice to go from “I like to draw” to “I draw well enough to make a living at it”, followed by another 5-10y to get to “I just sort of move my hand and Art happens without much thought because I have internalized a ton of stuff that I used to have to do on paper”.

YMMV.

This. The most underrated comment. :-)

I think you are conflating marketing and product marketing, which are different functions at Apple.

I think Apple does lay it out very clearly in their iPad marketing. They consistently show people doing two categories of work:

Creative, meant the way an ad agency uses the word: graphic design, video production, photo editing, desktop publishing, etc.

Office work: reading and writing emails, reviewing and editing and signing documents, messaging, etc.

I can’t remember any product marketing that even implies the iPad is a platform for coding. I think developers get hung up on the word “Pro,” thinking it refers to them. But in Apple’s world, “Pro” has covered a wide range of professions and often leans more toward the “creative arts” as listed above.

I remember hearing that Apple interally explicity will not go out of their way to avoid one product canabolizing another. If that happens, so be it.

Normally I would agree with this, but I think in this case Apple would have to do so little to make this a suitable enough device to the software development crowd, and without affecting how the device works for everyone else, that I wish they'd just do it.

All they'd need to do is allow sideloading. Even if they left all the other sometimes-problematic security aspects in place (like enforced sandboxing), it would be enough. People would find a way to do what they need to. I don't need it to be a full replacement for my Mac, but it sucks that I can't use this amazing, capable device to a bit of work on my sofa or on the train.

Of course, they'll never do it, because money. Even if 99% of apps stayed on the App Store, the highest earning 1% would be sure to leave.

But why would anyone want to develop on an iPad - on a sofa or anywhere? You will need a keyboard anyway, and by the time you've added that you may as well just get a MacBook Air and use the device emulation in Xcode instead of trying to run natively.

Sideloading will never happen - not because of money, but because it makes no sense to destroy the security model for 95% of users just because 5% of users want to run as root, or some nearly-but-not-quite approximation.

> But why would anyone want to develop on an iPad - on a sofa or anywhere? You will need a keyboard anyway, and by the time you've added that you may as well just get a MacBook Air and use the device emulation in Xcode instead of trying to run natively

Because then I wouldn't need to own a laptop. I prefer work on a desktop most of the time, and I already own an iPad Pro. It seems silly that I need to own a third device for what basically amounts to company policy. And the advantage the iPad has is that the keyboard is detachable. When I'm just browsing the internet or watching Netflix I can remove it and hold the device in my hands—something I can't do with a laptop.

> Sideloading will never happen - not because of money, but because it makes no sense to destroy the security model for 95% of users just because 5% of users want to run as root, or some nearly-but-not-quite approximation.

There's no reason it couldn't be buried in settings and approved on a per-developer basis. This is how it already works for enterprise apps: you install the app via a browser, but then you have to go to Settings to confirm you trust the distribution certificate used. The only change required would be to allow any developer cert rather than just those belonging to the enterprise programme. This is essentially exactly how notarised apps work on the Mac.

I tried this with a Surface, because I thought exactly the same thing - I can watch movies in bed without a keyboard, and add the keyboard to code, and the pen thing will be awesome, and so on.

My experience was that the imprefections in the experience were enough of a distraction so that I never got really deep into flow. I could do quick bug-fix sessions, sure, and write emails, and jot down ideas. But it absolutely did not replace a laptop. I eventually gave it to my girlfriend who loved it because she could do all those things, and then she got a tech job and had to get a proper laptop for all the same reasons.

> I could do quick bug-fix sessions, sure, and write emails, and jot down ideas. But it absolutely did not replace a laptop

Honestly that is basically what I want—a few hours here and there for when I can't be at a desk. I currently use a 16" MacBook Pro as my primary machine. I purchased it shortly before the pandemic, because I needed to use it both at home and in the office, and I didn't want to buy two machines.

Since COVID, my department has transferred to permanent remote working, so 99% of the time I'm at my desk. I would love to ditch the MacBook for a desktop machine and fill the remaining 1% with the iPad, even knowing the limitations of the form factor.

When more desktop Macs are updated with the Apple CPUs I'll probably look into the feasibility of VNC-ing into a machine at home from the iPad, but it just seems like a shame to squander all this potential.

good luck with it then :)

Ahh, yes; the old hacker credo:

"it wasn't designed for me, so I'll leave it."

I still feel a lot of people haven’t read the book About Face, on interaction design. The OP would have been unnecessary.

Different form factors have what they call different postures. It’s a lot less sovereign than a full desktop or laptop. It’s a lot more an auxiliary device, or leisure device. The Ipads sit alongside the spectrum, the pro is more sovereign, the budget ipad is more auxiliary.

What apple really needs to create and I believe has been positioning themselves to do so for a few years, is a surface like device that runs OSX in docked mode and iOS in undocked mode.

What good would that do for Apple? They’d rather you buy two separate devices.

The same with the “mid tower” Mac fever dreams from a decade ago - Apple have proven their intent and the market hasn’t punished their approach (in fact rewarded it).

Any wishes to the contrary are just that.

> However, if you're planning to attach a keyboard to your iPad most of the time, just get a MacBook Air instead. On the flip side, if you're getting an iPad Pro, you should really be planning to buy the Pencil with it to take advantage of its strengths.

Agreed, the big thing about the iPad Pro is the pencil and note taking/markup/doodling abilities. However even so chances are that someone has the keyboard attached most of the time and is still a heavy user of the pencil on iPad. Meaning that the iPad is the right form factor.

Extrapolating further, even if the Air supported pencil, the form factor would mean that using pencil on the upright screen would always be compromised. Then the added appeal of the iPad + Magic Keyboard is that it’s the perfect form factor for note taking/annotations/doodling /drawing and it has this powerful processor and keyboard when you need it to.

So to me, even if the Air and iPad Pro start to have overlapping features, the form factor difference alone gives them enough differentiation, both being useful.

Yup. It's well known what Apple's hardware strategy is.

They want each and every device do as much as it can, before moving up the chain.

The watch does everything you need it to do before you move to an iPhone. The iPhone does what you need it to do before moving to a iPad.

For most people the iPad does everything they need so there's no reason to move to a Macbook.

> generally suggest that people are bad at realizing when a product wasn't designed for them.

Ever has it been for Apple products. Either people are stupid for wanting the product, or the complainer wants the same product with three features removed, for half the price.

I don’t ever hear people talk about cars this way. I struggle to think of another product category that gets this level of consistent shade. Meanwhile my retirement is going to be quite a bit more comfortable from being an AAPL shareholder since OS X.

(I had serious bad experiences and resultant beef with 68k era Macs, and swore I’d never touch another one until they had a “real” operating system, which OS X was).

> It's a bit like complaining that a drill should have a flat back so you can also use it as a hammer. Sure, it might be technically possible, but not only will it never be as good as just using a hammer for the job, it would make the drilling functionality worse.

You might want to rethink your example!

https://www.petzl.com/US/en/Sport/Anchors/ROCPEC

A very good example actually. As a developer (in the construction sense) you wouldn't use a mountain climbing hand drill to build a house. You would have specialized electric drills, and standalone hammer (or several) since charging and weight isn't really an issue there.

That hand drill is exactly the equivalent of shoehorning any IDE onto an iPad, as in, doing the best within severe constraints.

No, this one of those “There are two kinds of people in the world”

“Those that have imagination and those that don’t“

I am really disappointed that Google or Microsoft haven’t don’t a better job with tablets. Apple needs more competition.

The laptop of the future is a better iPad.

Remember when Apple told us we didn’t need bigger iPhones? If it didn’t fit in one hand, you were essentially doing it wrong.

nit pick!

> (iPad Air or iPad no-adjective)

iPad Air (and iPad Pro) are so-called open form compound nouns of the noun+noun variety – nary an adjective in sight.

See https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/parts-of-speech/nouns/com... and https://www.ef.com/wwen/english-resources/english-grammar/co... for reference.

English rarely uses postnomial adjectives, the exception being archaic, Latinate, or poetic language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpositive_adjective

From your first link:

"A compound noun is formed when two words are combined to make a completely new word. This means that the meaning of the new word must be significantly different than either of its parts individually."

iPad Air and iPad Pro are not significantly different than iPad individually. "Air" and "Pro" are modifying "iPad."

Also, I couldn't find anywhere Apple refers to these iPads in the plural, but they definitely call them "AirPods Pro," which points to postnominal adjective.

Hmm. The product is Airpods – Apple Airpods, not Apple Airpod. When you buy them you get a pair of Airpods, the same way you get a pair of shoes. I bet you people say "Airpods Pros" … and they do! https://www.google.com/search?q=%22airpods+pros%22 (By your logic, they shouldn't – by your logic the plural of Airpods Pro is juest Airpods Pro.

I guess iPad Air means iPad (Air variety) and iPad Pro means iPad (Professional variety). So it does seem that Air and Pro qualify or modify what an iPad is. Sort of like attorney general becomes attorneys general (here general is a postpositive adjective)

Quoting:

These kinds of compound nouns have what are called “postpositive” adjectives. The adjectives follow the nouns, as opposed to being in front, as they usually are. They include “account receivable,” “heir apparent,” and “professor emeritus.”

https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/plural_problems.php

I don't believe the author was suggesting that the iPad become a Mac.

Steve Jobs drew an analogy to cars and trucks. iPads are like cars; smooth easy rides. Macs are like trucks; much more versatile but a bit trickier to use.

Nobody wants iPads to become trucks.

They just want to ride Lexuses, not Corollas.

AvE has something to say about your opinion of drill usage ;P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJOSVStpZ2Y&feature=youtu.be...

> you're planning to attach a keyboard to your iPad most of the time, just get a MacBook Air instead.

Bullshit.

I shouldn’t have to buy two functionally equivalent pieces of hardware just to use two different operating systems.

At this point the hardware is the same damn thing. Disable touch input on macOS if you really want. But having to purchase and carry two pieces of virtually identical >$1000 hardware is absurd.

That’s an incredibly entitled viewpoint. The separation between OS and hardware is arbitrary - one where due to a historical trend but Apple isn’t obliged to provide that to you. Purchase accordingly.

Obviously. They’re free to sell what they want and I’m free to buy or not buy what I want. And complain about it on meaningless Internet forums.

But the fact remains that the difference in hardware is now negligible. A MacBook Air and iPad+Brydge are basically the same hardware in basically the same form factor. Except the iPad has more capabilities.

Is it entitled to not want to buy and travel with two different expensive things when one thing can obviously perform all tasks? You’re free to think that if you want. I’m not likely to change your mind.

Apple is stubborn. They will eventually cave. It’s just a matter of time. They should have flipped the switch 5 years ago. They’ll probably wait another 5 before making the correct decision.

I'd say it's entitled. Any travel at this point is purely entitled.

Feel free to complain about Apple. Are there other vendors doing better with a similar level of stability in their platform?

I think there was a time where folks inside Apple felt that the iPad was the future of computing, destined to overtake the laptop and eventually go beyond it.

These new Macs are tacit admission that the iPad isn’t the only future of computing and that a lot of folks do have a need for something like a laptop. Keyboards and touch pads (good ones) are simply better input devices for a lot of applications. Having a stiffer hinge that allows you to comfortably place the machine on your lap is a core feature. And being able to load apps from places other than the App Store isn’t optional for a lot of creative types who end up writing custom code for some part of their workflow.

There’s still a place for a more simplified walled garden approach (my mother loves her iPad as a primary computing device and it works great for her use cases), but I do think the iPad Pro will get phased out eventually in favor of a more streamlined iPad lineup.

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