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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

Peak Hacker News. Comparing an iPad Pro with a Pinephone to do something 99.9% of iPad Pro target audience wouldn’t even know the meaning of.

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I hear this argument a lot, but I don't buy it. Let's flip it around, 99% of people will want to do something with their computer that will turn out to be a giant pain in the ass with an ipad compared to a mac or windows laptop.

If you had a friend/relative that didn't have much money, and was asking you for advice about which "computer" to get and they can only have one. Would you recommend an ipad? There is no chance I would recommend an ipad in this context.

Jobs liked to describe computers as bicycles for the mind. The ipad is a unicycle for the mind.

No, and you know what, neither would Apple, otherwise they wouldn't offer M1 Macs. The mistake is that everyone thinks Apple wants its product to be everything, just because their marketing tends to encompass and emphasize bold claims of universality. The reality is that Apple knows pretty well its segmentation. The Pro in the iPad Pro is the same Pro of the iPhone, it simply doesn't mean what the average hackernews reader thinks it means. The Pro is a videographer, a photographer, an influencer, a consultant and so on. In general, a subset of the creative professions or someone that needs a slick device to show its presentations on. I'm lucky enough to review tech products for a living and I've been through the last seven generations of iPads. iPad Pro is a product of its own league. It's perfect for low-distraction pro tasks like writing, for example, with light research on the side, but it's absolutely the best device I've ever used for professional photography workflows. I have, indeed, suggested to many photographers to absolutely buy the iPad Pro, as it's simply a game changer. The quality of the screen paired with the speed of the the AXX chips is unrivaled on Macs, unless you spend quite some money to buy a Eizo monitor or some other professional device. So here's a simple "Pro" definition that in my book is way more effective at explaining why the iPad Pro does not need to be what so many users here think it should be.

I agree that the target market might be different. However, even though multimedia workflows work pretty well on the iPad, some of the same restrictions that apply to development apply there.

For example, there's no notion of rendering a video in the background, organizing project files independent of the application, a plugin ecosystem for creative software, and proper IPC between these apps. So even though the market is different, there's still a lot to be done to come close to desktop editing workflows.

I've always desired an iPad Pro for displaying PDFs of piano sheet music while practicing, because it's light enough to not damage the piano stand, and has a high resolution display. But then I realize the iPad Pro is kind of overkill if I don't intend to use it for anything else. Can you recommend a cheaper alternative? Maybe one of those e-paper things, or some other light tablet?

Why not a non pro iPad?

I've tried that, unfortunately regular iPads are just too small for full-page display of musical notation. Actually right now I just prop up my MacBook Air, but then the keyboard sticks out, and similarly it only displays 1/2 page at a time, and so forth.

gotcha, that makes sense. You might be able to get a cheap chromebook with a big enough screen that folds into a tablet form. One thing to be careful with on these is the brightness of the screens if you want to use it outside.

iPad Air? But any non-Pro iPad is ok if you don’t mind much about the bezels and the less spectacular display. In general, if you have just one intended use for a tablet as a “smart lightweight device with a display”, and that use isn’t tied to an App Store app, then Android tablets are worth checking. The high-quality display might be a bit more of a problem, though, unless you go for a product with a similar price range. If you have other Apple products, the ecosystem advantage is huge.

Ah I didn't mention, for music purposes a big screen is ideal for reading letter/A4-sized sheets of fine-print music for long periods of time. It's a pretty niche use case, I guess.

That's a pretty food idea! I've just been printing it out. I feel like most e-readers are too small though.

If you're not going to do anything where performance matters why pay a premium for it?

Video and photo editing are common iPad Pro use cases where performance matters.

I always assumed that safari/youtube/netflix were the common use cases. Do numerically many people actually video/photo editing on these devices to make it "common"?

As far as I can tell, those would better describe the use cases for the plain old iPad, whereas the iPad Pro is meant to be used for more content creation in addition to those things.

I've been a little confused about Apple's product lineup the last decade; does anybody else miss the foursquare grid of consumer/pro and desktop/portable?

You are not alone. :)

Yes, absolutely. In photography circles the iPad Pro is regarded as an amazing device that offers performance and color quality that you won't be able to achieve even with expensive desktop monitors. Also, for the professional photographer, whose average rig is probably worth at least 20 to 50k depending on what they do, a 2000$ tablet with these characteristics is a steal.

Well, now, that's interesting. I legitimately did not know that, even though I own three Blackmagic PCC4k video cameras and take quite an interest in 'playback technology', whether audio or imagery. I do know that my horrifyingly over-expensive iMac Pro has a good screen, but not Pro Display XDR good. I'd assumed the iPads were basically consumer grade.

So the iPad Pro actually does make sense for color timing and proofs and working in DaVinci Resolve etc? If the display is relevant for this, damn straight giving it a good CPU is going to matter.

People are going to be doing serious video color correction work on these things. I certainly won't… but it's going to start looking very compelling for that audience.

The screen is honestly amazing. Puts everything else in its field (and most pc / laptop monitors) to shame.

That was before the M1 laptops. I would say that most desktop users would be better served keeping their workflow than moving to a tablet workflow.

I do all my audio editing on the iPad. And I generate artwork (generally by mangling stock photos) on there. I also do a little bit of video editing but not enough to count it as a common use case.

It has a great screen, it's very fast, it has built in 4G and the single tasking nature also makes it my favourite tool for writing (including coding, if I don't have to do UI work as well).

For me, it's definitely a creation device and one of my favourite computers of all time.

It's also infuriating because it could do so much more - but as soon as it starts multi-tasking properly it will lose some of its strengths. Same goes for the magic keyboard - I use it a lot but the utility of it has to be balanced by the fact that it turns it into a laptop, which is something it's not.

Do you really think apple would be making pro level devices for that exact purpose if people werent?

I make a (good) living working as an iOS developer on the video editing app (LumaFusion) shown several times in today's event. We have a very solid userbase, including plenty of people using it for professional work. Apple chose to use the app as a featured example in marketing the new iPad. To me, that's all evidence that video/photo editing is indeed a "common" use case for these devices.

Anecdotally, these days my wife (an artist) does digital painting and photo editing exclusively on her iPad Pro because she prefers the software available there combined with the Apple pencil.

Haven't you heard? Programming is the only "pro" or performance-intensive thing that exists.

I don't even understand why programmers are always so up in arms about devices like the iPad. Why on earth does one want to program on a handheld touchscreen device anyway? I have zero expectations for that, much like I have zero expectations for the laptop I do program on to be a good drawing device.

I don't get the huge blind spot there, either, and it's pervasive on here every time the iPad comes up.

"I can't boot an OpenBSD VM on it so it must only be for watching YouTube, for sheeple consumers, not godlike 'creators' like me".

Meanwhile it's plainly great for all kinds of creation-oriented activities, especially where the real-world meets the digital. The sensors are great. Pencil is great. It's a really good companion-tool for all kinds of real-world work, better than a laptop (though actually iPhones often beat both iPads and "real" computers, in that regard, just because of the form factor) Plus it's got some damn good, often-interactive educational apps, some of which work better on a tablet than they would anywhere else. Much the hell better for several of those things than any laptop running a "real OS for Serious Work".

But no, it's just a Netflix console for drooling morons, because you can't easily HAX0R it to replace the lock screen with a port of DOOM, since if you can't do that then it must not be any use for creating things. Give me a break.

Amen.

The whole "this device isn't meant for programmers" argument is a red herring. I don't like how the discussion ultimately boils down to complete control over the OS. That's not going happen, and likely requires a different mental model around OS abstractions, so we should put that aside.

My original point was that productivity apps, whether its photo/video/audio editing, word processing, or 3D modeling, all categorically benefit from features like better file management, IPC, background processing, working with external displays, easier keyboard/trackpad navigation, etc...

I saw some things in the presentation around external storage and thunderbolt devices which look like steps in the right direction, but the OS is really not doing it any favors. I would guess that the iPad is successful among this demographic despite iPadOS, not because of it.

Don't forget only UNIX guys are programmers, the rest of us using XCode and similar tooling are just muggles.

Well yeah, you are. We real programmers program by fabricating our own NMOS transistors and wiring them together by hand.

How is that different from any other computer?

Point is, the limitation is software. Even an extremely underpowered niche toy beats the iPad in a common, intuitive task for such a device.

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