iPad Pro M2 | Hacker News Reader

iPad Pro M2

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304 pointsdoerig722 comments

I Work IT in a institution with 290 employees and have had 5 switch to iPad Pro's to "replace" their laptop. I am now 5 for 5 with all asking for their laptop back.

iPadOS is nothing more than iPhoneOS renamed and the device is still too heavily crippled for desktop/laptop replacement.

In my mini test case scenario I never said a word..simply the employee asked for iPad Pro.. I just handed it to them... waited... then about 2 weeks later they asked for laptop back.

Not sure what Apple's plan here is but they continue to market this to schools and workplaces as a laptop replacement but refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted.

Kids who don’t know better might become accustomed to it and, unless they are power users or interested to become that, they might prefer to scrape by with the iPad.

There is pretty strong evidence that people aren’t great at using full fledged operating systems and feel much more comfortable on a slate with a dumbed down UI

Most people aren't power users. An iPad is a great device for lots of people. It's my favorite computer to use mostly because of the excellent apps.

What you call a dumbed down UI, I call streamlined. It's simple, focused, and fast.

You’re right. Ironically my “dumbed down” description was a little too dumbed down itself. I agree though, there are cases where a tablet is actually a better tool too.

I suppose the problem is that they rarely present us with opportunities or necessity to dig deeper, learn more, and become adept at working with and within the operating system.

I could be wrong, too. The truth is I only use an iPad once every couple of weeks for 30 to 90 minutes. My point of view here could be too limited to be accurate, and I’m totally glossing over non-Apple devices.

I would not say that “people aren’t great at using full fledged operating systems” but that fully fledged operating systems aren’t great at accommodating people.

I think it goes both ways, but I agree, we’re mostly bad at making software work well for human beings.

I do think people have individual limitations though, and eventually complexity becomes exceedingly difficult to hide being a well designed user interface. That’s not their fault though, and I worry that we don’t consider this often enough as we race towards higher technology. We’re definitely leaving people behind.

iPads and Chromebooks are rapidly taking over education. Both K-12 and in college.

I think the pandemic really accelerated things. A lot more students are using iPads, rather than paper notebooks.

Chromebooks won this battle.. handily.

My perception is that this is largely based on price. Not necessarily because it’s better.

Nope,

Apple didn’t listen. They had to make a low cost plastic version of the ipad to survive education.

The chromebook is far cheaper and far more functional.

Kids throw devices like crazy and it turns out that having a glass-only ipad is more expensive (spending $100 on a case that successfully helps it survive is one expensive solution though!).

Note that all this is coming from a huge iPad fan that has used it from day 1 (and I am typing this on my ipad pro!).

On the contrary, I have owned MacBook Pros from the first to the last 17", then again every model since the 16". I also have iPad Pro with magic keyboard and touch pad. I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me.

I've also been CTO at mega bank and hedge funds where we've rolled these out along side laptops. I've found that after initial objections, folks tend to agree. After a month or two, white collars who are not devs generally have switched to carrying the iPads, not laptops. Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale.

Users do have to think differently. That's ROUGH. Employees will ask for their old thing back if it changes their workflow, period. (See the book "Who Moved My Cheese?")

If they just use it, they generally find out it's fine. Could even be argued the Office / Teams ecosystem is superior.

Bonus: Letting employees have TWO screens (MacBook + iPad) also gives them two retina class monitors, portable, fantastic for hoteling or remote work or work from home. Two screens are better than one, and two that go with you are amazing. The new keyboard/cursor sharing while each device runs its own apps, with copy paste and drag drop between them is even cooler. In this model, the iPad Pro can become a Teams or Slack device, for instance, while other work stays on Mac, so you just wander off to a meeting with your collaboration tools intact. Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go.

" I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me."

Interesting, how long have you been iPad Pro only? At the price point of the iPad pro with a keyboard and touch-pad.. why not just buy a laptop like the MacBook Air?

Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard seems less convenient than just using something like the MacBook Air. Unless I am missing something here.

> At the price point of the iPad pro with a keyboard and touch-pad.. why not just buy a laptop like the MacBook Air?

1. cellular + eSIM, missing from Air (WHY, Apple, why?)

2. detaches into perfect touchscreen tablet, Air doesn't

3. Apple Pencil (requires "Paperlike" for texture): https://paperlike.com

4. it's a great second screen in either extend desktop or keyboard/mouse mode

> Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard

No, the keyboard is the case, you have no sense of carrying a second thing. In fact, it's a magnetic dock, you USB-C charge through a port in the hinge, iPad pops on and off mag-safe style.

Interesting, I hadn’t heard of Paperlike. I’ll have to give it a try.

Paperlike is pretty pricey. I bought a similar screen cover on Amazon Canada by Bellmond for CAD$20. Works great!

I am a lawyer, my boss uses an ipad pro heavily for work. He usually does not have much time to work on stuff, we mail him the contracts, documents etc., he marks them up with digital pen with his comments and sends it to us to revise. He finds it extremely productive. He can give instructions on the go, even while physically walking to a meeting room.

Prior to the ipad pro, we literally took printouts and handed it to the boss for his comments. He doesn't bother with word comments. Many older senior lawyers who learned the practice before word processors still work this way.

For jobs not requiring much typing and special software, iPad pro can be a good addition.

For replacing my work computer, oh no.

If I were provisioned an ipad pro, I'd use it to read and markup contracts, look up legislation, occasionally jump into calls and I'd be pretty happy. I could work on my commute, quickly review documents and respond in off-hours etc. instead of carrying a laptop. The IT provisioned laptop takes ages to boot up, heavier and more fragile than an ipad.

Another problem is that screen and keyboard doesn't quite replace pen and paper in my industry. I switched to Onenote from using a paper notebook during remote working and I miss taking notes on paper greatly. I frequently miss parts in contracts when I read on the screen and have to be extra careful. If I were in the office, I usually printed these out. I knew a senior lawyer who wanted us to print out every piece of related legislation so that she could work on it. She refused to read them on computer.

iPad pro could be highly beneficial for low-tech human mind driven industries such as law.

I know there is AI, I am grateful for redlines and spell checkers, but the computer screen and keyboard interface lacks in some ways.

I'm in an architecture adjacent company and often deal with PDF drawing sets. When I get a 400 page PDF with E-size pages and I'm trying to look through a whole building to find or count something in it, I send those right over to the iPad.

Now that I think about it, displaying gigantic PDFs is probably the most performance intensive thing I use it for, and the iPad Pro is very fast at it.

What do you use for giant PDFs? I have some textbooks on mine, but nothing performs/functions as well as readera does on my android phone.

I’ve found PDF Viewer from PSPDFKit GmbH to perform very well, though I also sometimes use Documents by Readdle which lets me do things like reorder pages without a subscription.

Not sure if Documents is still that way for new users or only because I paid for it back before everything under the sun turned into a subscription.

Thanks!

iAnnotate handles my PDFs that are 100s of MBs with absolutely zero lag.

>Many older senior lawyers who learned the practice before word processors

Considering how long ago that is, they must be pretty old. I mean, I'm 58 and I can just barely remember that time.

They are not young :). I live outside of US so technology might have come a bit later to us. And law is an industry that does not like change that much.

I talked to a lawyer in his 70s about this. He liked the way that dictating forced him to consider his thoughts in advance and speak in paragraphs. Technology has made dictation/typing pools unnecessary, but it's worth considering the ways that it might have led to benefits that we currently miss out on.

I've kind of found this with certain reporting that I used to automate. I used to be of mind that everything that can be automated should be automated. I've come to realize it's a big mistake as it limits my processing of information. Even cutting and pasting can have me thinking about something more than automating.

Heh - I am a lawyer too. One of my old bosses didn't budge off paper even during covid. We had to email him PDFs of drafts so he could read them on his iPad and occasionally he would print them. If he had comments or revisions, he would print the draft, write his comments, and then use his iPhone as a makeshift scanner (no scanner app - he would just take pictures.)

Once in a paper file I had the only example of A4 paper I've ever seen - I'm an American. He was traveling in Europe and we had to send the draft to his hotel so they could print it and give it to him. He wrote comments on it and brought it back.

I'm not of his generation but I think I'd find an iPad pretty useless for work. I print most things I need to review so that I can read the closely and scrawl notes on them, though if I need to give the notes to someone else I put them into Word or on a PDF - but after printing it. I find it too cumbersome to review documents on the computer.

The most I could use an iPad for is a second screen to look up statutes and cases and the like, or just to read emails - but it's too limiting even for emails. In Windows I drag emails to folders to save them, and I take notes with Notepad, go look stuff up in the browser, etc. The iPad is just too limiting.

Former lawyer here. iPads make much more sense for senior partners than for associates or junior partners. They're reviewing documents and writing emails, not composing long memos or doing intensive legal research on the web. The battery life and "boot time" differential are great for senior folks who don't need a desktop environment.

I don't think this dichotomy maps onto technical roles, since there are more technical things you can't do on an iPad, but it's worth recognizing how much iPads can be a game-changer for some of the most senior people in organizations.

For travelling specifically:

• The Magic Keyboard acts as its own case for the iPad Pro. I wouldn't keep a bare laptop in my bag, but I would throw the iPad-Pro-in-keyboard-case in there.

• The iPad (any iPad) is better for reading books, watching movies, and all the other stuff you do more of on planes/trains/automobiles, than a laptop is. The Keyboard Case holds the iPad up in the air by about two inches (getting the screen closer to your eyeline without straining your neck), and then lets you further position the screen at strange angles (e.g. "inward") for better viewing — angles you can't really adjust a laptop to. And if you want to read a PDF, a graphic novel, or anything else designed to be viewed vertically, you can, at full size — just pick it up and turn it. (Maybe pull the case off to make it lighter, if you're going to be reading for hours.) Basically, the same logic behind bringing a purpose-designed e-reader device.

• If you have a Pencil to go with it, it can also be a reusable piece of paper with infinite "template" content pre-loaded — since you can arbitrarily mark up any PDF or image in the Files app, you can just load on a PDF of coloring-book pages, and now it's a coloring book; or grab a PDF of crossword puzzles, and now it's a crossword puzzle. No purpose-made apps required for either. (If you draw as a hobby, it can be your sketchbook, too; sadly, I'm no artist.) In other words, bringing an iPad also replaces packing those dimestore "activity books", and/or a notebook + actual pencil.

• iPads (or really any convertable / 2-in-1, where you can fold away the angled keyboard part of the computer) are great for showing people the stuff you do / giving people demos — which is something you might be doing a lot at conferences, if that's why you travel. This is a pretty unique use-case; tablets themselves are really "the thing" for this. They maybe replaced... handing out brochures? Having a glossy explainer book printed, and then packing that? Bringing a portable projector + slides?

• Kind of like the recent revival of "intentional dumbphones" that encourage "unplugging", the iPad is designed in a way that still allows for productive work, but makes it less fluid. I can SSH into prod from an iPad, but I don't want to do it for a minute longer than I have to. If you're travelling on vacation, this could keep you focused on relaxing, in a way you might not be if you have a laptop along, tempting you to spend eight hours ignoring your wife and kids to squeeze out that new feature that popped into your head.

Notice that none of those are benefits of the iPad Pro specifically. I don't think that, for at least my use case, there's really much I'd get from an "iPad Pro with Keyboard Case" over an "iPad Air with Keyboard Case." Mind you, I have an iPad Pro... but I bought it because I had the money, and wanted the beautiful color-calibrated display; not because the Air wouldn't have suited my use-case just fine. (Though, when I bought it — 2019 — they weren't yet selling the Keyboard Case for the Air.)

I'm a lawyer and I also only travel with, and can do a lot (but not all) of my work on an iPad. I probably spend more on my iPad Pro + keyboard than I would for a laptop. But the iPad is also my primary e-reader, I watch movies on it, I take note on it legal pad style, etc. Google apps all suck on iOS so I don't use them. I occasionally remote in to a desktop for this or that, but less frequently.

I mostly find that nerds who don't like iPads have opinions that are like 5 years out of date. Trackpad support is great on iPads. The Files app is all I need on a portable device for file management. I can use any USB device I ever want (though in practice, I never do).

Usually it's still lighter. When I have back problems I will pick up the iPad and take it with me rather than my MacBook Pro. It has the added bonus of being easier to read pdfs and annotate them while traveling too (it's not perfect. If I'm gong to be digging around my email archives I prefer to do that on a Mac but that's partly the way our company limits Outlook on iPads.

I know people who are laptop power users who are fine traveling with just a tablet and an external keyboard. (They still use a laptop when they're not traveling.)

Good for them but I've never been able to make it work for me. I'll just carry the extra weight. But, to your point, it's also true that, beyond getting an external keyboard, I've never really committed to making a tablet work for me as my only travel device (other than a phone).

Why do the support costs go to zero? I would think iPads would bring their own set of problems/hazards that laptops may not have.

It’s next to impossible to get an iPad to a non-working state.

A creative user with a Windows laptop can do it easily unless it’s really tightly locked and controlled.

And sometimes Windows just does that on its own.

Basically, they're an appliance, and hard for a user to screw up.

Of course it's not actually zero.

There's always someone whose finger can't poke things that will ask where the mouse is, or why this stupid iPad doesn't run Lotus 1,2,3 -- and you have to respect their challenges. Or of course (rare) hardware faults, and you have to provision a new one.

But the appliance-ness of it makes it a support dream.

Unless you are a power user who manages to overload it so severely it becomes unusable (not hard to do, if you’re a certain type of power user - unfortunately), it’s basically just a big iphone you can attach a keyboard too.

Much harder to actually break or make unusable than the typical 5-10 yr old windows laptop from the lowest bidder most people interact with.

How much spyware have you seen gunking up the default experience on an iPad? Compare this to a typical consumer laptop.

I thought with an iPad you simply can't manage it remotely. If you can, I want to know, because my father-in-law keeps screwing up his iPad and I can't fix it without shipping it back and forth.

You need an MDM to manage it remotely. Something like Jamf Now is $2/device/month. Not sure how much the shipping costs, but might be break-even

Sure you can. Look into MDM services like Jamf Now.

Splashtop will let you view an ipad's screen. It's fiddly to start (remote user has to allow access, enable broadcasting, etc every time, and this is a non-trivial step to get over), but it does work, in the sense that seeing the screen is faster than just guessing what is going on as your panicked user pokes randomly at things no matter what you say, leaving you with no context.

It is functional enough to be useful, if the other person on the line is good at following instructions.

The biggest drawback of iPad OS is lack of windows, to drag around.If you don't need to multitask - iPad is OK.

I tried going all iPad and my husband opted for iPad Pro as personal computer - it is woefully underutilized.

"And that's not just me"

> biggest drawback of iPad OS is lack of windows, to drag around

First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around.

iPad Pro in its landscape dock provides split screen with adjustable ratio, as well as left and right floats, along with swipe between desktops, as well as push to view and pick a diff app. One app wide, one app narrow, tends to put the narrow app in iPhone UI, which is pretty ideal, better than desktop where windows refuse to get narrow.

You can drive iPad with a magic touch pad beautifully. I suspect this workflow management is behind some of the gesture convergence in Ventura and iOS 16.

IMO productivity users are mostly lemmings. MacOS has plenty of good tooling built in to manage windows and desktop environments. A tiling window manager makes a lot of sense with cli based tools but for gui based tools imo becomes annoying fast. Especially when most websites these days will serve you a mobile website depending on the dimensions of your viewport.

> First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around.

Interesting point of view, but I must either live in a parallel universe or know no "productivity users" (whatever that is supposed to mean) then. Windows' window management features cut it for 99.9% of Windows users, and the rest use PowerToys Fancy Zones or something of that sort.

And iPadOS window mgmt features cut it for 99.9% of users so… even stevens?

> First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around.

Well... OK. I'm clearly not a "productivity user".

I'll prefer better optimized workflows on my phone and flexibility and speed of a full sized keyboard with a mouse. Every few years I fall into this "this looks cool, lets try" iPad thing - to only go back to a mouse.

I use cascaded windows. It doesn't need a window manager and it's more useful & productive for me than tiled layouts. It looks like this:

  +--+--+--+--------------------+
  |  |  |  |                    |
  |  |  |  |                    |
  |  |  |  |                    |
  |  |  |  |                    |
  +--|  |  |                    |
     +--|  |                    |
        +--|                    |
           +--------------------+

I generally put terminals and my note taking app towards the left (smaller windows), my IDEs in the middle (enough for split pane editing when needed), and my browsers on the right, where they are in square / portrait aspect ratio more suited to reading.

Thing that really kills iPad for me is the web browsing experience. I just find iOS Safari so limiting.

It's also needlessly slow (considering M1). I suspect they have some optimisations designed for memory constrained devices like iPhone tuned in the same way for iPad.

Also ad blocker support is limited.

Oh and in a lot of video calling apps, if I try and browse something in Safari while the meeting is happening, then I'll suddenly stop sending video. Though that isn't strictly a Safari issue, more a Apple holding back features from third-party developer issue.

> Also ad blocker support is limited.

Try 1Blocker or AdGuard Pro. And similar limits (for similar "this shouldn't run that there" reasons) just arrived for the Chromium family.

> needlessly slow

I tend to find that when I notice slowness, I have several hundred tabs open, approaching the 500 tab limit. Save all tabs to bookmarks, close all tabs, and I find it's as "snappy" as the new iOS meme. (Related? New device, no tabs? Hmmm...)

Super annoying this hasn't been resolved since introduction of cloud synced tabs.

> And similar limits (for similar "this shouldn't run that there" reasons) just arrived for the Chromium family.

If only there were another browser other than Safari and Chromium that didn't have those limitations...

Orion let’s you run full chrome and Firefox addons in iOS and iPadOS. No joke

That's incredible, thanks for sharing! Looks like it's still working on supporting some APIs (claims to currently support about 70% of Web Extensions APIs), and so far both the Firefox and Chrome NoScript extension don't appear to work for me on iOS, but that's awesome that they're working on adding support for Chrome and Firefox addons. I'll definitely keep an eye on this project.

Currently the ublock origin and dark reader I have tried with the Firefox extensions work very well, but I haven’t tried any others so it is good to know.

As it stands right now, there is essentially no windows support or support for the various browser sync plugins, but both of those are on the way. The main developer seems like a nice dude, and I’ve had a chat with him on Reddit a couple times so it is definitely a VERY active project.

If you want to be my hero, can you try to install this extension on Orion on iPad

https://github.com/WaldiPL/playbackSpeed

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/playback-spee...

And let me know if it works on say a youtube video with speeds above 3x?

I don’t actually have an iPad, only iPhone. But if you give me a couple of hours I will do so and reply to your comment with my results

I did try on my iPhone and it didn't appear to work :(

I tried it on mine as well and it didn't work.

The API is at the same state across all versions of Orion as far as I can tell, which means that at the point it works on your iPhone it will also work on iPad. I would guess that it will be quite soon considering even a couple of weeks ago uBlock didn't work 100% and now it is fully functional.

> then I'll suddenly stop sending video

Does this happen to be with low power mode enabled?

AdGuard Pro seems to block ads well on iOS/iPadOS. I haven't noticed the browsing experience to be any slower on my iPad Pro M1 than on my 13" Intel MBP.

I prefer Safari on iOS and macOS because it is so limiting that I assume it is helping conserve battery. With Wipr content blocker, I never see ads and it is generally pretty fast.

I cannot imagine doing my job on on iPad, it's way too limited. can you open more than one google doc at a time yet? run desktop extensions on the web? open complex sheets/excel files? I have no idea what job other than sending emails and being on video calls all day could work on an ipad.

Yes to all of those and they’ve been supported for years with the slight caveat that extensions are more limited and need to be provided by an app

also the caveat that excel/sheets is not good on ipad.

You absolutely can't open complex sheets on the ipad still, I just tried a few and they're not functional. how do you open more than one doc natively? I'm still seeing online that it's not supported (using the browser doesn't count). And yeah, none of the extensions I use have a special iOS equivalent.

Why is using the browser not countable? It’s how I deal with sheets anyway on desktop.

Are you talking about second screen as in Sidecar - or just to open the same app that you would use a Macbook for - eg Slack, email?

Anything in the gSuite is terrible on iPadOS. Excel is also fairly crippled. I can’t see how it’s usable at all.

Even just for emailing, GMail at least is a terrible application on iPad. For examples, cannot format anything, or view one email while writing another (that isn’t a reply).

I primarily use mine for

* Note taking

* Browsing/showing PDFs in a construction engineering setting. Nothing is faster or as flexible.

* Sketching for construction drawings

But the lack of good tabular worksheet and emails beyond quick replies pushes me back to my laptop all the time.

I gsuite good anywhere? It's not good in the browser on desktop/laptop devices, certainly.

I have noticed they cut tons of features from the iOS versions and keep you from using the site if they're installed (and maybe even if they're not? That's got to be how I ended up with them installed, I wouldn't have done it by choice), which is super annoying and makes no sense since I'm sure it's all the same webtech crap as the "real" sites, just wrapped so it's "native".

The Gmail app ate multiple gigs of ram and repeatedly crashed on my prior two Android phones. Disabling it and using an alternate mail client works much better.

That is strange. If it is one app that I have never had a problem with is Gmail on Android(Nexus and Pixel devices)

>I gsuite good anywhere? It's not good in the browser on desktop/laptop devices, certainly.

Re web-tech: All iPad/iOS browsers run a low-perf version of Safari under the hood. In my experience anything Google seems sluggish on Safari. Frankly, I think that a part of this is due to FUD (Safari is not slow).

I still use FF and Safari for 99% of my browsing, but certain sites just require me to use Chrome.

I assume anything Google is extremely energy/processor/RAM intensive and only consider it as a last resort on battery powered devices.

It's basically the same Safari, no?

No, WebKit is the same across devices.

That’s not 100% correct.

Web views aren’t the same, neither is the JS runtime configuration, hence the performance differences.

My entire company (800+) runs on gsuite for better or worse. At least in browser on desktop its functional.

> I gsuite good anywhere?

Yes? I use a Linux laptop + firefox, g suite works great even for docs that have hundreds of pages (though I do use a top of the line Lenovo P series with an i7 and 32GB of ram).

Google seems bound and determined to make their user experience on Apple products as painful as possible, perhaps in the misguided belief that if we see how awful their products are, we'll want to switch to their native operating system.

Main effect for me has been to drop them like a steaming deuce, but not everyone has the luxury.

Excel is almost guaranteed to be a terrible fit for iPad. Data import/export has always been a weak point with the iOS and the many of the use cases for Excel are data crunching. If you are pulling out the keyboard and mouse regularly then a laptop seems less awkward.

> Data import/export has always been a weak point with the iOS

I don't think this is really very true anymore, and I say that as someone who moved away from using an iPad as my main portable. I'm sure there are specific cases where that's still a problem, but now that it has a file manager, USB drive support, a full array of cloud services support, etc. etc., this is just not a big deal.

At any rate, if you're a dedicated Microsoft Office 365 user, you can be working on the iPadOS version of Excel and using the same files stored in the same cloud service (ideally OneDrive, of course, from Microsoft's point of view) pretty transparently.

I suppose this is colored by my distrust of cloud storage. Since I don't use it for the most part a lot of the "easy" solutions don't work for me. Putting my data on someone else's servers just never seemed like a great idea to me.

I’m just talking about basic worksheets to do some math in 5 minutes, let alone actual hard work.

I disagree, I think there are 4 good GSuite apps on iPadOS: GMail, Meet, Calendar, and Drive.

With the magic floaty keyboard, even long emails feel fine on iPad.

Unfortunately, Docs, Slides & Sheets are pretty terrible, and fall far short of the desktop experience. For those apps, a Chromebook would be a much better choice. If only they made Chromebooks with trackpads as good as Apple's laptops, or even as good as the magic floaty keyboard.

Meet is in my experience worse than Zoom and Teams, and with the latter that is saying something.

Gmail and Calendar are great. Drive is also sub-par in experience when compared to Dropbox (probably Box as well though I've not used it)

Oddly Sheets is the only one I like. It is good enough for most use cases and simpler and easier to use than Excel.

I've never even considered using Docs or Slides.

Office 365 is hard for most organizations to switch from, since the overall package is a set of tools that are generally better than the Gsuite competition.

Some MSPs I work with make good money just converting businesses from Gsuite to Office 365. I don't use either platform personally or at my work, but I understand why Microsoft is eating the SaaS email & baseline office tools market.

I wouldn’t say gmail is good if the compose button floats on top of my inbox, a new message opens up in a modal and covers anything you’re trying to read/refer to. No format buttons.

Sheets is terrible. Cannot use the magic keyboard to shift your active cell (ie click a cell, type = and use arrow keys to find the cell you want to reference.. it just quits the cell).

Sheets is a bad UX across every class of device. My mouse supports horizontal scrolling. I can horizontal scroll in every window that requires it, because it's supported at the OS level. Sheets uses it's own control for scrolling which seemingly does not support horizontal scrolling from a mouse wheel.

Lots of people only look at data. A crippled mobile version that permit read access is good for an awful lot of people.

Let's look at pharma. They have a ton of sales reps and relatively few people in tech roles supporting them. Similarly, they have folks in scientific roles that push all software to the limits with a few people supporting them. The use cases of the sales reps are very well catered for on iPad and reps make up a lot of the user population. They present products to customers (eDetailing), have some basic data entry (CRM), might browse a range of reporting, and do some email. Email is critical, but as a sales director, that's not where you want your reps spending time. A limited experience somewhat helps just reply or move on.

I make no claims that this is sufficient for sales directors or scientific staff. It is however very well suited to some of these roles. It's also very reliable, cost effective, and easy to provision. It's unfortunate that laptops end up being so complicated in comparison for this audience.

> Anything in the gSuite is terrible on iPadOS.

Yes, well, monopolies will generally try to sabotage competitors.

Is gsuite even ahead of office?

Maybe it's just me, but I can't think doing any meaningful work without access to the filesystem.

What do you mean with "filesystem" specifically, that isn't available on iPads?

There's the Files app.

Does it allow you to have access to the whole fileystem, unrestricted access?

It allows access to a filesystem, just not the root filesystem.

You can do all the basic copy/cut/paste ops and create whatever folder structure you want. Don't expect to edit system files though. People spend lots of time looking for vulnerabilities to achieve that.

The iOS file system is very frustrating. By default, applications can only access individual files in their own sandbox, and if you want to point an application to a folder of media, you can't—it's simply not possible, or if it is it's so burdensome that it's simply not practical. Least of all for images, which for some reason are not accessible from the Files application and have to be manually exported from the photo gallery app, and music, which is not accessible at all: you need to clumsily use Apple's proprietary sync program on an actual computer.

In contrast, Android also doesn't let you access the root file system, but the user folder is yours to do whatever the hell you want with, and if you want to give your audiobook or music app to your folder of mp3 files that you've collected over the years, you can.

What do you need with unrestricted access to the root file system?

I think the arguments is non-developers don't really need access to it.

You aren't configuring anything or doing anything that needs access to the file system.

You are simply interacting with documents and online systems/applications that you can do the same as on a laptop. Add the greater mobility and the iPad pro really is a better device for most people.

However, as another commenter mentioned, these individuals who SHOULD really benefit from using an iPad primarily also are the group that struggle greatly with the changes to their overall workflow (see Who Moved My Cheese).

Thats kind of a poor argument that just self fulfils itself. If we mask things like the filesystem and the actual shell, then of course no one will really need to use it. If we unmask these things, maybe paradigms will shift and they will themselves use these things.

IMO so few people know how to code because we have been abstracting it for years, not because its tough to do or anything like that. Plenty of things people do are just as challenging as coding. You just need exposure to coding is all, its easy to write bash or python. Anyone could do it in a week. Hard to get that exposure when a company decides it won't be possible for you, and its a slap in the face considering these features are there in the device but you have to jailbreak the damn thing and violate your warranty to get at them.

>Hard to get that exposure when a company decides it won't be possible for you,

The company decided it was not possible using a specific product. You decided to use a product where it was not possible.

If you are not the most technologically inclined person, its really the company's marketing that is choosing the product rather than you. Its true with any product you lack relevant knowledge in, marketing becomes the dominant factor of choice beyond tooling that you don't fully yet understand. I think what is especially frustrating in this case, is that these capabilities are already there built into the device, they are just not exposed unless you jailbreak the device.

> I think the arguments is non-developers don't really need access to it.

I bought the device, why shouldn't I?

My MacBook doesn't either, with system integrity protection, and I'm just fine with it.

why do you need that for meaningful work? anyhow, github codespaces is usable on the ipad. i've done billable hours while traveling on my ipad, as long as the internet is good.

But very few apps built to work files/folders.

Image files?.... they obviously want to be mixed in with your photos!

Media files?.... you don't want those!, would you like to subscribe to Apple Music?

What apps don’t work with the Files App that it would make sense for?

Well, transferring files between an iPhone and a Windows PC is still far more of a pain than it should be.

Still can't just treat the phone as a drive and put files on there.

(edit: or trivially share a folder on the LAN over wifi, without even needing the USB cable, if you're considering the iOS device a 'real computer')

In the same way you can't treat a laptop as a drive and put files on there (transfer from another pc); because it's not a drive.

Except you can on the Mac. Ever heard of Target Disk Mode?

Yes when I want to transfer a few files between Macs my first thought is “let me use target disk mode”.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/transfer-files-mac-...

Seems pretty simple with iCloud for Windows.

So transferring a file between 2 local devices should require sending it to a cloud server and back?

To be fair, apple devices have airdrop for transferring files, which works much more seemlessly than any kind of network drives I've ever used (and I'm using one right now).

The interface exposed is just not mounting a remote file system.

You can’t connect a laptop to another laptop and treat it like a drive. Why expect anything different from a phone that’s really a computer?

If it was a real computer with a 'real OS', I'd be able to easily set up network shares and transfer files over wifi, without even plugging a cable in.

Well I can transfer files wirelessly via AirDrop to my Mac.

You can do it with a third party app

https://mobiletrans.wondershare.com/iphone-transfer/transfer...

I've been using real computers with real OSes for a very, very long time, and when someone says "hey, could you send that file to me," I confess my first thought is not, "Why, sure! Let me just configure a network share that you can mount on your system to do it, because that is obviously the easiest possible way I have at my disposal!"

Yes you can. It's called Target Disk Mode on the Mac.

Yes and you can also easily share files from an iPhone over Wifi on a Mac. That isn’t possible on a Windows PC either.

Any concrete examples?

As far as image processing apps, I've been using procreate and affinity designer. Both use the file system and not the photos app.

As far as audio processing, apple's own garage band app works natively with audio files and lets you slice and dice them.

Try thinking outside your specific needs. The raw filesystem is an antiquated interface that, honestly, a vast majority of people do not need. In fact, if you observe average computer users, the filesystem is what really impedes their ability to get things done. In fact, the filesystem introduces a huge complexity when the application does not know where its files exist. Did the document you downloaded in the Downloads folder? The Desktop? Documents? Or is it in the last folder you downloaded? Users want to get things done, not hunt for files. The iPad paradigm solves a lot of regular user issues. It was never meant for "power programming users". The car vs. truck analogy.

> The raw filesystem is an antiquated interface

Not really. It has often been tried to find something better, but there really isn't. It works decently on Apple because they set certain constraints and standards. But overall it is like saying a table of contents in books is antiquated. You don't need it for belles lettres, sure. The analogy doesn't fit too well, but there a similarities.

It is actually the most simple way to present structured information. It is not optimal, but decently approaches it. This is a reason why it is so successful and to my experience even normal users don't have too much trouble with it. Alternatives obfuscate this for everyone.

A table of contents isn't the same thing as the raw file system, and is much more analogous to the simplified file system available on iPads.

It is an insufficient abstraction because it gives you less power as a user. Same with everything on iOS. This sadly creeps into MacOS too.

If a table of contents it is a good analogy depends on what you define as content. For me the content is all the files.

A generic way to view data content is a file explorer that lets you explore the file system. Some abstractions can be here too, but it shouldn't be too much and certainly not to a degree like iOS. I can understand why it is there, it is a consumer device primarily.

If you have more than 10 documents, how do you organize them by topic? Into a new folder? Thought as much...

> don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad

This is what everyone I know with both devices does. I still prefer my Mac, but I'm in the minority in the under-fifty crowd.

This isn't contrary. Quite the opposite. None of the cases you present are iPad only. They are iPad alongside laptops. They might find cases where the iPad is fine, but none are iPad only.

And your "bonus" is basically an iPad Pro as a $1000+ chat device.

Now, if you mean that they added an iPad Pro, and eventually stopped ever using their laptop, that's a different story, but that's not what you said in your comment.

>> Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale.

Genuine question - what is the biggest time sink/cost for support on laptops? Put another way, exactly why do support costs drop so much with the ipads?

I remember a project in the early 00s at a place I was working. They were rolling out Windows tablets to installation engineers[1].

The justification was to reduce breakages to the screen and hinge of laptops[2]. It sounds daft but apparently it was not uncommon for people to leave their van keys on the keyboard and then shut the lid on them.

By switching to tablets they hoped to get rid of that failure mode.

I imagine that's quite specific but just having less moving parts will increase reliability in a large organisation. A keyboard on a ThinkPad might be easy to change if it fails but a keyboard an iPad will be even easier as it's not attached permanently.

1. In this particular case that means people in hard hats and high viz going up telephone poles and into holes in the ground all day.

2. Standard issue at the time was Panasonic ToughBooks.

The fact that you can do all your work on an iPad as well as you could do it on a Laptop may say more about your work than the devices. I do not mean this in an insulting way, but perhaps your work is so disconnected from technology or the creative process that you could do it, no matter the device you're using?

IMO companies should give their employees one e-ink screen instead to save their eyes. Most office-style work can be done well on those screens and they are much healthier. I now barely use paper as I use an A4 Onyx tablet with e-ink screen and do most of my notes there. It's so much better than using iPad for that.

My concern with anything e-ink is display latency -- if the display isn't updating at a fast-enough clip, I don't think note-taking would be an enjoyable experience.

These days they have multiple modes - they can be fast depending on how precise pixels you can tolerate.

> Two screens are better than one

Seems annoying actually.

I think for me a major bottleneck of using iPad as laptop is that the screen is still gonna be on heavier compared to keyboard, and the whole combo doesn't feel as solid and sturdy as a good laptop does. iPad feel more physically free in some ways (you can just use screen etc ...), and physically restrictive in others (doesn't feel like one big sturdy unit with keyboard).

That all aside, as an engineer it's too restrictive and less fun. I'm sure it can get a lot of other non-programming workflows done quite well though.

People have been using MS Surface for years now. So top heaviness is generally not an issue that impacts productivity.

The magic keyboard works great. You can even get BT knock offs for 1/3 the price. Works fine on your lap.

I'm not questioning the productivity but the feel of it, if you care about that. It always feels natural to me when weight distribution is heavier towards the keyboard.

I can't speak for Surface Laptop, which I think had a bulky keyboard, but the the normal ones (I think was called Pro), always felt weird. Obviously this all is personal choice.

I think the overall point is, iPad is nice replacement only if you are not going to be using keyboard much.

I was referring to the Surface Pro. Forgot that the laptop even existed. A better keyboard for the Pro would be welcome but not a deal breaker.

The cantilever design iPad keyboards are indeed very heavy to counter the tablet weight. Which brings the total weight of an iPad with the keyboard to almost MB Air weights.

The iPad is really crippled by software. Undoubtedly they cannibalise their own sales by allowing MacOS to run on iPads. But they have purposely killed off their own product categories before. Having that dual mode device is great.

I wonder who at mega bank and hedge fund isn't using excel...

My experience at mega bank is that the IT department is often delusional about what business users actually do.

There are plenty of depts with a good iPad use case, typically those with very standard workflows and few apps.

Think about HR who just need Zoom/Meet/WebEx, Greenhouse (or whatever ATS), and email+calendars.

Office admin, customer support, etc. all have simple needs that benefit from a really nice, but easily controlled and secured device.

Also, don’t underestimate how much “the Spotify app works” will entice people too.

Yeah, you won’t convert all the quants, engineers, etc but they aren’t the target. That said, in my experience they love the iPad as a second screen that’s very portable, in contrast to the high powered very unportable workstation.

The biggest factor for iPad adoption is really: “is there an app”. Particularly with SaaS tools there’s often a decent which lends itself to iPad usage.

Yeah this sounds ridiculous. I work at a large asset manager which is constantly upgrading tech after being hamstrung on the budget for many many years. Everyone gets an iPad if you ask for it and a lot of folks who travel need it for making notes in conferences etc. I don’t have a traveling job but I could still get one but it is useless for almost anything beyond doodling. I generally take meetings from my desk so I don’t even use a notebook in most cases and just type it up on my laptop. I did get a separate desktop because I have dev work that requires a lot of compute power from time to time but I manage with those two devices and have never felt anything lacking.

> Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go.

Completely lost me. You don't logout, close all your windows, and so on, when you undock/unplug and go mobile. I never have a problem picking up and going with my laptop, then coming back to my desk right how I left it. And the 27" monitors (32" also common here) are far, far better for productivity and dev work than a 13" ipad HDR screen. iPad is a poor choice for a 2nd screen.

You can even create a separate workspace for when you detach. I don't do that myself but plenty of my colleagues do. (If you don't do that then sometimes a window re-homes itself if you resize or move it while undocked, thinking that is its new home.)

Ran a similar play recently and found a similar result.

Can’t understate how much people want the nice/fancy/pro device too. It’s hard to lure people off MBPs to generic PC laptops or chromebooks but an iPad Pro + magic keyboard is shiny enough.

Not just lower support cost, but much higher security bar at a lower cost too. Having been at the same fund, and other big banks, that’s an important consideration. Strong MDM, yubikey support if you want it, decent app sandboxing, etc. gives a lot of security control in a nicer manner than on a desktop OS.

Finally, I think the Office/GSuite issue depends so much on usecase and who’s using which bits of each suite. Gmail is so much nicer than Outlook, but GDrive horrible organizationally compared to OneDrive, while GDocs collab beats O365, etc.

I'm curious about the workflow for these employees... How do your staff actually get things done? Are they in excel/word/email all day long? Custom apps?

In dev/data science there are some okay cloud providers (gitpod, etc) that work resonably well on iPad in a pinch but I can't see moving dev full time to one.

For our use-cases if you think about a recruiting team who are just using:

- GSuite for email, calendar, etc - Zoom for candidate meetings - Greenhouse as an ATS

Then those all have dedicated iPad apps which are very usable.

Same story for office admin teams, EAs, etc.

A few questions since this is a novel thing I haven't really heard of in the business world!

1) What tasks do the people you manage tend to do on their machines?

2) Why replace the laptops with iPads if you expected it to be disruptive for a month?

I think there's a big difference between traveling with an iPad Pro and only having an iPad Pro.

You might not need anything else if you only do some presentation work, data display or write some mails.

It also shines for people that like to write non-digitally. Awesome to draw a quick sketch. But for anything else? Not really a working device. It seems to convince management because Apple is shiny.

This isn't some topic about thinking differently, this is a topic of being restricted, which frankly iOS (before rebranding) simply does to you. Maybe you can map all your workflows to some iOS tool, but I assure you that a notebook is still more powerful. The two monitors might indeed be an advantage though and I hate any form of hoteling and luckily don't do that too often.

If they would just allow UTM to run, that would be good enough for me.

https://getutm.app/

This! They even enabled swap on iPadOS 16. Why oh why can’t I run a VM?

If they're competing against Chromebooks, they're maybe better actually.

Because web apps can actually opens up the flexibility of a classical computer system again. For strategic purposes Apples support here is minimal.

Still not optimal, but certainly far better for education, not only because of the price and because you don't make yourself dependent on a single manufacturer or at least to a lesser degree.

Largest problem is the lack of education of teachers though.

I use the ipad for reading music scores but would never replace it with a laptop. M1 and M2 is overkill for a consumption device that doesn't have a real file system accessible to the user.

It's not just that the OS is crippled, the apps are as well.

Trying to quickly navigate between apps, edit, and copy and paste, is an exercise in frustration.

> refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted.

Is this your opinion or was there any feedback from those 5 users?

> but refuse to add functionality to the OS and keep it overly crippled/restricted

What would the point of "adding functionality to the OS" be? If they wanted to put macOS on iPads, they'd just put macOS on iPads.

My understanding at Apple's strategy here is that they're simultaneously exploring two different GUI paradigms — almost pitting them against one-another to see which wins (or, if you like, making a hedged bet):

• macOS, for building "Unix pipeline-like" workflows where you point different programs-as-tools at the same document or take one program's output as another's input. Apple encourages macOS developers to make this kind of app.

• iPadOS, for building "all-in-one silo" workflows (think: Photoshop, Garage Band, XCode), where the developer intends to solve fully for a use-case, such that people with that use-case can get by using only their app. In these cases, rather than interacting with other apps, a siloed app will embed whatever other accessory workflows a user might need, either directly (e.g. XCode embedding a terminal console) or through plugins (Photoshop plugins, Garage Band VST support.) The user might use other apps at the same time as this app, but not in a way where the apps are sharing data or interacting in any way; rather merely using each app to "do what it does" — e.g. referencing a design diagram in Miro while implementing that design in XCode, and writing down reminders in some reminders app. (Thus, the iPadOS 16's Stage Manager, which assumes you want several apps on screen at once, but doesn't implement drag-and-drop between apps or any other kind of useful inter-app interaction.)

As a user, as long as each user-story you have has been perfectly addressed by some particular siloed iPadOS app, then iPadOS should work for you. (And there are a lot of people whose user-stories have all been perfectly addressed by these siloed iPadOS apps — mostly, people with boring, predictable, traditional workflows. Novelists; illustrators; business executives; possibly salespeople.)

However, if your workflow is niche or "constantly reinventing itself" enough that nobody's ever going to make a siloed app specifically for your needs, and so you expect to get things done by throwing files between various different tools all day — then iPadOS is never going to work for you. You need a desktop OS designed around that kind of thing.

Well, MacOS won. Silos don't work, and they especially don't work when Apple controls the means of distribution single-handedly. MacOS has clutched onto a shred of relevance by letting the user install package managers, download software from the web, run software compilers, and so much more. There is not a future where iPadOS "wins" and MacOS is slayed in ritual combat, or something. It's obviously not a contest, and even by your own admission the separation of these OSes is mostly arbitrary. Apple knows they're gimping the iPad, they're just expecting other people to not care.

Everyone would be happy if Apple focused more on perfecting the iPad's hardware instead of pushing iPadOS to the brink. An iPad with options to run MacOS, iPadOS or Linux would be the knockout product-of-the-decade for Apple IMO. Judging by the design of Monterey, I think iPad/Mac convergence seems fairly likely.

I don't think we would see full convergence. Apple does a decent job at having classes of devices. What I could see is, the top of the line iPad Pro converging with the Macbook Air. The regular iPad, minis, etc will probably stay with a relatively locked down iPadOS. You want an "entry level" Apple laptop, you get an iPad Pro. But if your work flow requires more, than you go with a Macbook Pro, iMac, or Studio.

> There is not a future where iPadOS "wins" and MacOS is slayed in ritual combat, or something.

Well, no, it's not about the Operating Systems; it's about the UI paradigms themselves.

I believe that Apple is worried that the desktop WIMP UI itself is going to be disrupted and fade into irrelevance due to 1. "do everything on the web" devices like Chromebooks, and 2. VR/AR productivity-workflow paradigms that are yet to be formalized; and so they're trying to find a successor to the WIMP UI, one that will still be relevant in 2040, even if/when the WIMP UI dies.

The distinction between iPads and Macs isn't arbitrary, insofar as iPads don't require a keyboard, and Macs do. iPadOS (and iOS) apps have to be designed under the assumption that a keyboard is optional; and that really changes things about how an app can work. You can port apps designed for keyboardless tablets to macOS just fine (and as of the M1 you don't even have to, you can just install them); but fully-featured macOS apps can't just be thrown onto a keyboardless touchscreen. (And you can't say "well, you can't install 'keyboard required' apps if you don't have the keyboard", either; the OS has no idea if the user owns a keyboard but just hasn't bothered docking it.)

You are accidentally correct in the other direction, though — that there's no reason you couldn't run iPadOS as well as macOS on a theoretical "touchscreen Mac" (which would be a different thing than an iPad, precisely because the keyboard would be welded onto it, and so apps could guarantee its presence/require you to use it.) The reason that Macs don't have touchscreens, AFAICT, is because Apple wants to use the iPad — along with everyone who buys one, and every developer who signs on to develop apps for one — as an isolated laboratory to run this "successor to WIMP UI paradigm" experiment. They don't want to "dilute" that experiment by allowing those users and developers to get the advantages of the iPad from any of their other products — because then those users and developers wouldn't be incentivized to use the iPad, and thereby to give them the experimental data they need.

Consider: why didn't Facebook just merge Instagram and WhatsApp into features of Facebook Messenger? And why is it still considered a huge mistake that Twitter killed Vine after acquiring it? Because, like the iPad, these alternate experiences — despite being owned by the same old bigcorp that serves you the traditional experience — are both innovation laboratories, the learnings of which can be folded back into the regular app; and also hedged bets against the market failure of the old-school experience. Vine could have been TikTok if it had been allowed to grow for a few more years. What could the iPad's UI paradigm be if allowed to grow for a few more years?

> What could the iPad's UI paradigm be if allowed to grow for a few more years?

Well, we asked ourselves that at the launch of the iPad. At the time it was basically a reading/web browsing tablet (in other words, revolutionary). But people had grander visions, like running DAWs on it and porting Photoshop and developing software. All of these things are not hardware-limited; their exclusion entirely boils down to arbitrary software decisions made by Apple.

So, we waited. We let it grow for more than a decade. What we have today is just a bigger version of iOS, which is a reflection of Apple's refusal to upset a paradigm they directly profit off of. They're genuinely incapable of disrupting the computing market, because they're the ones abusing the market the hardest.

My only hope is that legislation steps in to stop all this bullshit. Your customers shouldn't be treated like guinea pigs, and they should have the authority to install whatever they want on the hardware they own. If Apple can't design a product that respects those two simple principles, then they're going to have a hard time courting modern-day pros that use Macbooks and Wintel machines.

We’re not moving to the web totally unless the web recreates there UI features we already get on desktop. I have to juggle a half dozen apps at a time no matter how much I automate.

VR/AR makes people feel sick and are fundamentally uncomfortable in a way a screen not strapped to your face isn’t.

> As a user, as long as each user-story you have has been perfectly addressed by some particular siloed iPadOS app, then iPadOS should work for you.

And then I tried sending a pdf by email. Oh well.

Can I share it on the corporate FTP ? Oh no.

Let me airdrop this to you... Wait... is this a windows / android device ?

...

Alright, I'll just use my laptop. My iPad is too niche for this workflow.

Do you actually have issues attaching a pdf to email on iOS?

There are plenty of apps to upload stuff to FTP. If this was an actual thing you used with any regularity, you'd have something installed already if files isn't connecting for you.

> so you expect to get things done by throwing files between various different tools all day — then iPadOS is never going to work for you.

GP was right, iPadOS is never going to work for anyone having to send a pdf to someone else.

So, to be clear, it is not possible to email a pdf on an iPad?

No. And to be clear, it depends where the pdf is : if it's inside another app, like adobe scan, you can't unless you share it from the other app and retype your mail. If it's already in "Files", then you are lucky and some apps -like gmail- allow you to pick from "Files".

If you wish for Adobe Scan to store the scan in "Files" automatically, well, you can't. You have to "share" them individually FROM THE APP to "Files".

And I think you will understand, now : this is the same shit show when trying to upload something via FTP. Like family photos.

The UX is stupid. The workflow is abysmal. The discovery is inexistant. The teams responsible for this at Apple don't care, as it's been like this for _years_.

What else are you going to use an iPad for, except for editing family photos and annotating pdfs ?

I use mine to watch Netflix.

Is everything they do web-based? Or did they just not know that it won't run any desktop software and that even if there is an app-store version it's usually cut down to half the features of the desktop version?

I used the iPad Pro for about 2 years for nothing but productivity apps and it was overall pretty great.

It wasn't without issue though, here's what I ran into:

1. I didn't run any dev tools on the iPad. That's insane. I used a laptop running macOS for that.

2. Google Docs updates would always ship with weird bugs, like if I'm editing a cell in a Google Sheet and hit space, the space wouldn't insert.

3. There's loads of issues with drag and drop in most apps. Dragging and dropping a picture from Photos into a document is the most common flow which works in some apps, but not in others.

The plus sides:

1. The built-in cellular connection is amazing. I wish MacBook Airs would ship with built-in cellular.

2. The Apple Pencil (2nd gen) is great if you design software or UX.

Google Docs updates would always ship with weird bugs

Is that really an Apple problem? Sounds like Google is just lazy with QA on Apple devices.

Did you try Numbers or Excel and have similar problems?

Or Safari is not a good browser.

These are native apps.

I’ve been using Safari almost exclusively for 2 years with no problems. I did prefer Chrome for web page development, but I’m not doing that right now.

> 1. The built-in cellular connection is amazing. I wish MacBook Airs would ship with built-in cellular.

don't you always have your phone on you? i don't have any issue at all tethering.

I have an executive roll and I used an iPad almost exclusively from probably 2013 until about six months ago. It’s eminently doable.

Programming on the iPad was OK, in the sense that Blink Shell is a better ssh client than PuTTY, and I don't want to carry my desktop around with me. Eventually I switched back to a Linux 2-in-1 laptop -- it is nice to be able to run GUI applications locally, but it is nowhere near as good a tablet as an iPad despite whatever tweaking I try...

actually many people don't use putty and recommending putty in 2022 is not that good. Windows terminal etc can easily do ssh without any hassles.

I can't speak to how Apple attempts to make deals with schools and workplaces, but their normal consumer marketing seems to pretty clearly highlight the differences between a MacBook and an iPad. If anything they seem to go out of their way to maintain significant differences in the two operating systems (which, ironically, is also a very popular complaint in tech circles).

My daughter is 16 and has used an iPad for school for many years. Latptops are foreign to her. Same for her cohort. They are the next generation of adults and have replaced desktops and laptops with iPads and iPhones.

That is scary to me, an entire generation growing up within the walled garden and perceiving only Apple's products as what is possible for computers to accomplish. These computers are confining, as much as their constriction liberates the user in its simplicity, it is a real constriction. To me, that's exactly what the FLOSS movement hoped to avoid, and failed to do so by advocating for a purist f/open stance rather than winning smaller battles with open source at least staying in the war for market share.

Not just the walled garden. iPads are simply less capable as productivity devices than a laptop is.

Right now, for instance, I have this page open in a web browser, which has youtube playing in one tab, twitter in another, and this in yet another. I also have an iPhone simulator running behind this browser, a terminal window tail -f ing a logfile, and vscode in another window.

All of this stuff is open at the same time. I can hear audio from all of it, access all of it, see all of it, all at the same time. This is not possible on an iPad.

True, but that's not how most people use their devices.

Right, but some people do. And the people who do, used to be people who don't. And those people became people who do because it was possible. It is a bit worrying to me that so many people will be growing up with devices with such a low "skill ceiling"; devices which don't let your interest in technology bloom but rather restrict what can be imagined.

> And the people who do, used to be people who don't.

Yep. Walled gardens kill curiosity.

Curiosity is what got me into this industry, way before I knew it could be a career. Playing around, messing with files that ran my games, making web forums and learning to change how they look.

I think multitasking is the basic operation and these are normal operation. Ipad is seriously limited by Apple wallgarden design.

And, I think many people work like this if it will ever be available in wall gardened ipad.

When was the last time you used iPadOS? It can run multiple programs, and can display two side-by-side just fine. Yeah that means it's a little clunky if you need to switch between three or more apps, but it's not like it can't have apps in the background when you can't see them. (Plus, no need to simulate anything, you're on a real iOS device.) There's still no Xcode for iOS, though there is Swift Playgrounds if you're an iOS developer, and VScode still hasn't made it to the App store, but it's got a keyboard and a mouse so if you squint a little, it's fine for a large segment of users.

Sure there are limitations; you can't hit F12 and drop into developer tools in Chrome, plus iOS Chrome is just reskinned Safari anyway. Oh and the sound thing. I'm not saying a full laptop doesn't have more, but the lost capabilities simply aren't showstoppers for everyone, especially if you're not a developer. In fact, because they can have build in cell-modems and macbook air's don't, combined with the fact that there are decent SSH clients, it's actually a better device for some.

As opposed to other schools that use ChromeOS devices?

There is also very little digital knowledge for them to gain as they already handle their phones better than their parents. As a technically aligned kid I would have hated an iPad. Well, I still do...

I believe Chromebooks are more popular in the education market in general.

My son, 14, uses a Chrombook instead. I can compare both. Honestly, he hates it. Limited yet still expensive. He would much rather have a Windows or Mac laptop instead. The school prefers Chrombooks over Windows - easier to manage.

> In my mini test case scenario I never said a word..simply the employee asked for iPad Pro.. I just handed it to them... waited... then about 2 weeks later they asked for laptop back.

If you work in IT with hundreds of staff members, why would you let them pick their own devices with zero guidance? This seems like a recipe for disaster no matter which product is picked. Do you let them do this with laptops / printers / operating systems / etc.?

Nope there are only three computer models to choose from and that we support. The iPad Pro was added as a 4th option based on a higher admin recommendation (not in IT ). However we are now back to supporting 3 models.

What are the three laptop models

MacBooK Air 2020 M1. Dell XPS 15/17 iMac 2019/2020 (last of Intel model) - some users still prefer desktop (will run either MacOS or Windows on these)

We have over 3000 employees with Apple equipment as their primary device, and probably 200 of them are iPad Pro only.

They do serve different niches than laptops, but with a keyboard case in an Office 365 environment, they can be full office/productivity replacements for anyone who prioritizes light travel over running local software.

Given how you approached it (zero guidance and support), I'm not surprised all 5 asked for their laptops back.

It's a great consumption device though - ever since Google stopped paying attention to the tablet space we have an iPad 9.7 that lays in the kitchen and all my family members only touch it for watching Netflix or YouTube.

Even for browsing it feels very slow compared to Surface tablet or even Firefox on M1 MBP now a days.

It depends on the user.

Execs and task oriented workers are great iPad use cases. In a global org I’m familiar with, they run about 15k iPads, about 5-10% of the IT engaged headcount. Senior execs in large orgs in particular are ideal in the iPad environment.

For schools, I think the iPad sweet spot is grade K-4 for dedicated devices; 4-8 is Chrome and 8+ can be Mac/Chrome/PC. For shared or purpose dedicated devices, iPads fit every level.

Lots of other use case are limited by legacy or enterprise software. Police patrol car, medical point of service and point of sale are examples of use cases where iPads would be the ideal solution, but for the existing software.

I don't think Apple is marketing it as heavily as you think at replacing Workplace laptops, but moreso consumer laptops. iPad is a delightfully simple device for consuming any kind of media, editing photos and videos, light to medium gaming, and doing little creative things.

What kills it for me are the apps where you can't copy a single word. e.g. Apple's own Messages app, you're forced to copy the whole message.

Same for the spell checker. For some reason I have ridiculous trouble triggering it in certain apps. I can see the mistake underlined in red but I really struggle to get trigger the correction popup instead of the "copy, lookup, etc" popup.

Maybe it's just me but I don't think I could consider an iPad as laptop replacements without some basic changes to iPadOS.

> apps where you can't copy a single word

This one is ridiculous. On Reddit I always want to quote part of a message or copy a phrase to translate it, and it’s literally impossible to do. You have to copy the whole message, paste it in a text editor or in Notes, and finally copy what you actually wanted to copy.

This should be solved at the OS level.

> This should be solved at the OS level.

It is. Take a screenshot, then select the text in the screenshot.

I don't even understand the advantage of an iPad for non-drawing work. It's just a worse laptop with a too-small keyboard that can fall off and a square screen so it's not good to watch video on and an OS that doesn't do anything well. But Mac laptops are amazing, run all the same software, and don't have any of these problems.

I can't adapt to the workflow on an iPad either, and I have tried. I have really tried. However, I have seen other that have. To them the iPad is easy and macOS is overly complicated.

I am not sure if general computing is changing or there are now two branches, but I have watched other people do things on iPads that I consider impossible. Even simple things, like working in Excel, I find challenging on an iPad. But when I watch someone else who sort of "grew up" on iOS work in Excel on an iPad they are like some kind of wizard. I have found myself more than once now asking someone, "How did you do that?" feelsbadman.jpg

I think a lot comes down to muscle memory and shortcuts. While I know many/most of the shortcuts on iPadOS they are not automatic for me the way they are on macOS. I often have to think, "Wait… how do I do this on the iPad again," for even simple things. I even find drawing applications unintuitive. In the Adobe suite everything is explicit. In Procreate everything is unlabeled. This is even true in consumer applications, like Facebook vs Snapchat. Pinch here, tap there. Swipe from one of the four sides to reveal some function that is completely hidden. But for some people this is intuitive. There is an additional layer (or two) of UI abstraction in iOS/iPadOS that I have not internalized.

There definitely ARE some things you can't do on an iPad, but that list is actually shorter than you might think. There are a lot of things that you can do, they are just done differently… and in a way that, at least for me, seems to take a lot more work. But for others they are like, "Eww, why do I have to look for an icon and move the cursor over to it when I can just…" and then they proceed to input what is essentially sign language into the screen while holding down a modifier key.

I have an iPad Pro M1 11" with the Magic Keyboard.

It doesn't fall off or detach unexpectedly at all. And the keyboard size is close enough to "normal" that I don't notice for normal typing. The only thing I miss is a dedicated ESC key.

All that said, it only replaced my personal laptop. I continue to use a 13" MBP at work.

You can map caps lock to esc on the Magic Keyboard.

But why do you prefer this over a laptop?

For personal use… I like the size, it’s a bit more portable than a 13” laptop (0.5lb lighter with Magic Keyboard, 2.7lb lighter on its own), smaller footprint). It does everything I need (surfing, streaming, email, FaceTime).

Would I be happy with a 13” MBA as my personal device? Sure. I basically flipped a coin - the iPad won because shiny new thing.

For work, inability to run Docker/VMs and install VSCode is a deal breaker.

Work is not always about content creation, some people work mostly by consuming content (reading websites, browsing photos, selecting movie clips, navigating PDFs, or something else) and iPad is great for consuming content.

But not as good as a Mac at any of those tasks?

Could you elaborate? In what way?

Well I can use the exact same apps on the Mac to do all of those things, so there is functional parity. But you get the advantage of a more precise pointing device, keyboard, and an OS that lets me easily have multiple things open at once. Video is certainly better to watch on a Mac, since it's got the correctly shaped screen and doesn't fall over when you set it down.

What is so hard to understand about the fact that this is for you and not necessarily for everyone?

That's not hard to understand. I just think it's probably true for most people, not necessarily true for everyone.

Plus, I'm interested if the person I'm replying to actually thinks it's _better_ than a Mac or just "also good".

For me iPad is better at these tasks i.e. at tasks about consuming content.

I guess mostly because of its form factor (I can sit on a couch, no need to keep anything on my lap, I can adjust viewing positions easily) and the touchscreen input (to me it’s more immediate than working with the pointer).

It’s subtle; obviously you can sit with a laptop on a couch too, and touchpad can be intuitive as well. Still, for me it adds up to iPad’s UX being more approachable, more hands on, and more natural.

I think it's superior for reading. Newsletters, news, articles, etc.

I have my iPad Pro+Magic Keyboard with me 24/7. I wish I could code on it but that's it. For everything else it's perfect.

I don't like how Apple is making the iPad more laptop-y. My ideal is to use a normal desktop computer, and an iPad. No laptop. But if I had to pick only one of course it would be a laptop.

My use case for this would be fairly simple: future proofing, to make it unlikely to need a new tablet for 10 years

Makes a lot more sense if you consider the idea that "pro" has become a luxury designation rather than the audience they're marketing towards.

Without a clear description of what these employees were using their iPads for, it's impossible for anyone else to use this info to determine if their scenario fits yours.

Your ability to use iPad full-time depends heavily on the type of work you do.

I can attest to this, I worked in IT back in 2011 at a school where teachers loved the idea of iPad's over their clunky laptops.

However, in time, they all needed their laptops back and either gave the iPad back or worked 50/50 across both devices.

I have no doubt that today the iPad is more useful for students and teachers, but if you don't have a defined workflow that easily allows for the use of iPads teachers won't use them. We're all too familiar with the way in which Windows works and it integrates well with the networks companies use.

I personally carry both my ipad pro and macbook pro all the time. They’re just both so useful.

It honestly just needs virtualization. They don't care about evolving the product because they are mortified of cannibalizing a revenue stream in an official way.

Only nerds and IT would bother with virtualization and they'd net a new sale.

I've been eyeing an iPad Pro, but it's just a colossal waste as it trends strongly toward only consumption, which is frankly a poor purchase.

ipads (like phones) are appliances... designed for consuming. Much like a microwave or a fridge. they're designed for very specific scenarios. sure you could make it do other things... but it will not be very effective.

Laptops are swiss-army knives. you can create/consume/compute and they're pretty effective at all those things.

Either-or obviously desktop. But why either-or not both and an iphone as well. The form factor is so different. And if you develop with lots of internet and book/pdf to reference.

You can ask me to choose TV or ipad or even in reading novel kindle or … obviously not job setting but it is just different tools.

By design it is never going to be able to replace a "laptop" running desktop OS. If the workplace is not designed to work with iPad, then I doubt anyone really can replace even a MacBook with iPad.

Your "mini test" is invalid because they are allowed to choose, ie intermixing all sort of OSes together. In that case it is very likely any workflow the iPad excels at are not used in the workplace, and vice versa that anyone else' workflow is really traditional (as simple as depending on the file system a lot) that doesn't play well with iPad.

When your mini test doesn't agree with how successful it is (for business to deploy iPad), it just means your mini test is nowhere near the norm.

Eg you mentioned school, that's the best case for the iPad to shine, because everyone are mandated to use iPad, and the IT would have already figure out how to perform all needed tasks. (And bonus is that the students are a blank state with no prior bias on how to do a certain thing.)

One current day iPad killer app IMO is Procreate. It's basically a more intuitive version of Adobe Illustrator completely optimized for iPad + iPen. I bought my then girlfriend (now wife :D) an iPad for her bday in 2020 accepting the risk that we're spending a lot of money on an activity she might not stick with (digital illustration). Happy to report that I was totally wrong and we have def gotten our money's worth through the countless hours she has logged creating art. If she didn't have such a stellar app like Procreate she probably would have tried out other illustration methods. Not a guerilla marketing plug, I have no vested interest in Apple or Procreate. Just sharing an app outside my space that seems to not get much attention here on HN. You can check out my wife's art at https://instagram.com/gabjoart

ProCreate and illustrator aren’t comparable. The former is raster while the latter is a vector app.

I think you meant to or should compare it to Photoshop

From context "Easter" was probably autouncorrected from "raster".

I read it as Easter (as in colorful) vs Victorian (as in austere)

Haha yes, autocorrect on iOS 16 autocorrects backwards a word or two and it drives me nuts.

And only the digital painting parts of Photoshop, not photo editing. Which isn't to say that it's not a great app! It's just not a full on replacement for Illustrator of Photoshop.

If you want an alternative to Illustrator or Photoshop, Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo are more in that vein.

How does the iPad version of Photoshop compare to the full desktop application?

I've seen occasional blog posts about X feature from desktop being added to mobile, so definitely didn't launch with feature parity, though they made a big deal about how it was based on the real desktop Photoshop codebase.

But personally I dropped Photoshop when it went subscription (last version I owned was CS5) and I've never tried the iPad version, so no personal experience to compare it.

Not even Photoshop -- Photoshop is mainly about editing, well, photos, while ProCreate is about natural-looking brush painting. Photoshop certainly has brushes, but it's not even attempting any kind of naturalism. People don't generally "paint" in Photoshop. [Edit: from comments below, I stand corrected. Guess it's just the people I know.]

I'm not sure what you call that category of app -- painting apps? Natural-media painting apps? (Although you can choose to make them quite unnatural-looking too if you want.) Fractal Design Painter (later Corel Painter) invented the category I believe, way back in 1991.

I paint in Photoshop...

Photoshop is one of the primary painting apps in the professional industry.

From illustrators to matte painters, photoshop is probably the most common painting app you’ll find.

Procreate is an approximate subset of Photoshop.

Photoshop has an old, strong brand, allthe name is a bit anachronistic, but it has grown to be a product for all 2D visual art.

Are the 3D object layers from CS5 still around?

Both of these statements are untrue.

>People don't generally paint in photoshop

EVERYONE uses photoshop in the painting/art world. Seriously, almost everyone. It's the best app for it, and the only reason people use others in my experience is because they're either free or a one-time payment. Or, because they're painting on a tablet, where (the full) photoshop isn't available.

>while ProCreate is about natural-looking brush painting

This is also not true. People use procreate because of the simple UI, nice gestures, tailored to iPads, for a one-off payment - and because its simply just the best option available on iPads. There's no difference in what you can do with brushes, or "naturalness" between them. If anything, photoshop is better at natural-looking brush painting. If you're wanting natural looking brush painting, also check out the lesser-known Rebelle: https://www.escapemotions.com/products/rebelle/about?//produ... - which is designed to more simulate real physical paint, not just in terms of brush patterns but also mixing.

Corel Paint was (is?) hands-down the best natural media art application. I wish it were available on iPad.

Edit: I see Rebelle is quite a bit like Paint. Shame they tell fibs about being “first” to emulate physical colour mixing. Alas, not iPadOS.

Thanks for your comment. I was just about to waste time researching Procreate under the false impression it was vector.

By the way, if anyone is interested in a vector drawing app, I highly recommend Concepts.

Affinity Designer is another really good vector app and exists on desktop too so you can have a single app workflow

Affinity products are like if Adobe never got huge and bloated and instead just kept working on keeping Photoshop/Illustrator/etc modern and usable

except 1/10th of the feature set. one man's bloat is another man's essential feature. as a non professional I eventually had to give up as I couldn't keep CS5 running on Mac. I am still on Intel so I guess I could run an older macOS in a VM.

Yeah agreed. I own all the affinity products and i tried really hard to use them.

They’re just not comparable on desktop to the Adobe equivalents. There’s so many basic features missing right now and their forums mention they’re not planning to add some of them.

Had to go back to Adobe

Personally, I use Vectornator, although it has a history of being a bit buggy on lower-end devices (seems to be fixed now).

The direct competitor is Fresco I think, Adobe's drawing app for iPads

I bought an iPad in 2020 fully thinking it’s gonna collect dust like all my other tablets over the years.

Nowadays I use it more than my laptop. With the magic keyboard and pen, it really has become the perfect portable computing device. Great for writing, great for sketching diagrams, even good for light coding (like for code samples). And it is fantastic for creating talk slides and even presenting full day workshops. Love it

Was waiting for today’s announcement to upgrade. Running into memory issues lately :D

Is this 11 or 13" one? I found smaller keyboard is too painful to use. Maybe you can get used to as a daily, but will be upgrading to larger one.

I have the 11". Probably couldn't use that keyboard all day, but for a few hours of writing at a time it's perfect.

What size iPad do you have? Thinking about getting the pen but I have the smaller Pro, not sure how good an experience it will be.

I have the 11" and like it specifically because it's small. Perfect for working on the couch

It seems like iPad's main feature is that Apple refuses to put a touchscreen or 180degree hinge on a laptop. Laptop has a bigger screen for drawing and coding.

> It seems like iPad's main feature is that Apple refuses to put a touchscreen or 180degree hinge on a laptop.

And extra sensors. And two good cameras, front and rear, with depth & all the other stuff that iPad/iPhone cameras have that Macbook cameras don't. And make it far thinner and lighter. And better speakers. And iOS so there's a touch-focused OS on it. And a cellular connectivity option.

Dunno. For real coding I need a big monitor, a real keyboard, and a proper mouse. My laptop lives in its dock and the only time the built-in screen/keyboard get used are when I'm traveling and can't work from the home office.

Bought my wife an iPad in 2020 as well with the same fear that it will largely go unused.

She teaches at a university and would normally write copious notes on dozens of notebooks.

She got a copy of Goodnotes for iPad and started using it for her notes. 2 years later, she hasn’t touched any of her physical notes. All her study material is on iPad.

Very happy with the purchase.

I bought my wife an iPad Pro and then a Macbook Air after she complained she couldn't do some things on the iPad. Well, eventually she figured out how to do it on the iPad and the MBA has been collecting dust. I adopted the MBA because my trusty old MBP is damn near geriatric (2015) and it's like a shot in the arm. I should have bought it sooner for myself.

I have to ask, why did you buy an iPad expecting it to collect dust?

I wanted toys, could afford them, and I know myself. For example I have a Switch that was used a lot in its first month that now gets picked up maybe once a quarter for a few minutes.

Fair enough :)

What IDE do you use to code? I found nothing so far.

vscode in github, simply replace any github.com url with github.dev and you've got a full vscode environment with github plugins right in the browser.

Similar story here, my girlfriend uses the iPad/pencil/procreate to draw commissions for people. She absolutely loves it, went did an art degree but then went down a different career path and is now getting back into it.

In a world filled with apps that require a subscription, a persistent internet connection or filled to the brim with ads, procreate really is a breath of fresh air. Just buy it and use it like in the good old days.

Adobe purchasing Procreate in 3...2.... ;-)

Came here to +1 on the likelihood of transition thoughts and the discovery of procreate.

I also happened to gift an iPad Pro to my wife. Her daily workflow for work are apps like gdocs and buffer and the ipad handles that just fine. I think we underestimate how similar is the regular job workflow and overestimate the particular setup we need for programming / engineering.

And for digital art, she started from 0 and is now a pro at ClipStudio art and Procreate. She is working on her webtoon and has created plenty of nfts and twitter profile pictures on fiverr. I’ve started bringing an ipad to engineering lectures since it has also helped me a great deal with note taking.

I’ll send her your wife’s insta, here is her’s: https://www.instagram.com/yanora_draws/

Agreed. Procreate is a masterclass in iPad app design. Everything runs so smoothly, the features are deep but the interface is still beginner-friendly, it's a joy to draw in with the Apple Pencil, and it has really good options available for exporting your work. Plus, it automatically records a timelapse of every project that you can render out at the end, which is a small feature that I absolutely adore. All that for a single-time purchase? Heck yeah.

I can’t believe it’s just a one-time $10 fee instead of the ridiculous and increasing creative cloud monthly/annual fees. I don’t know how they do it. Maybe it’ll be an annual fee one day but at least the app is worth it.

Procreate is great, but it really doesn't solve the same problems as Illustrator at all. Apples and oranges.

I love how "Desktop-class apps" means extremely basic features available decades ago on desktop: "consistent undo and redo, a redesigned inline find-and-replace experience, a new document menu, customizable toolbars, and the ability to change file extensions, view folder size".

Not sure the desktop has moved beyond that though.

So seems about right.

Maybe the "pencil hover experience" will finally allow desktop-style "tool tips". So you can know what a button does before tapping.

True, but only for users of the v2 Apple Pencil with the new iPad Pro. For folks with v1, or with an iPad/Pro that doesn't support hover (or who just use our fingers), discoverability will continue to be a challenge...

Well, they can't push it too far because then it would become something too close to an actual laptop/tablet hybrid.

I'd argue that is exactly what they are doing. Their promotional material and many users are already using iPads as desktops... and they seem to be catering to them.

Could be, but at what point will they stop, i.e. how long before the iPad becomes the Macbook Air? In any case: if they don't stop then I'd think one of those would have to go, makes little sense keeping 2 product lines which are like almost the same?

I suspect that will happen eventually.

My M2 air is as thick as my iPad ...

Having said that it is also MUCH heavier (relative to what I'd like an iPad to be) and has a noticeably bigger screen.

Not sure how fast those gaps get closed.

When the iPad Pro is as expensive or more than the Air, and they feel they have the software down pat.

iPad Pro already costs more than Air in many configurations.

> if they don't stop then I'd think one of those would have to go, makes little sense keeping 2 product lines which are like almost the same?

I feel like this is exactly what they want. My only question is how much i'll be able to modify my laptop long term. Ie i run Nixpkgs (ie the package system from NixOS) on my laptop. The day i can't modify my Mac OS to my liking is the day i stop buying their laptops.

I do think there's a market for people who want laptops that have the lockdown of phones. Where less things can go wrong because you can't change a lot.

> The day i can't modify my Mac OS to my liking is the day i stop buying their laptops.

That was my mentality too. For me, the cutoff came when Catalina dropped (and I couldn't run 32-bit libraries, even after modding MacOS). Nix was the last thing keeping my sanity together when I last used MacOS. When they pull the plug on that, it's going to be a sad day...

> I do think there's a market for people who want laptops that have the lockdown of phones. Where less things can go wrong because you can't change a lot.

I agree. That's a software problem though, not a hardware problem. Much like the situation on iPhone, Apple could easily offer a "pro mode" or "developer mode" that offers extended functionality while disabling certain high-security features.

A long time.

If MacBook Air is a browser machine, then it's already happened. If it's a creative work machine, then well, it's close, but you still probably have a some kind of PC nearby.

If it's a developer machine, then the best iPad can do is being a ssh terminal or VSCode browser. A superb terminal, I use it every day to work because I don't have personal laptop.

The iPad doesn't become the Macbook Air until it can run XCode and you can develop, compile, and test iPad apps on the iPad itself.

It has always been artificial market segmentation. Their message is clear: don't buy apple if you want a laptop with a touchscreen. Apple will only sell you oversized phones and regular laptops.

And don't buy a Windows laptop if you want a laptop without a touchscreen because the UI will be designed for touch even if you only use a mouse. Although macOS is unfortunately trending in this direction also.

Complain to the developers? Windows will tell applications if they're in laptop or tablet mode, if you don't like tablet mode then don't use it.

> don't buy apple if you want a laptop with a touchscreen

Keep buying Apple laptops, got it. I know that a large number of people keep asking for laptop with touchscreen, but this is one design decision where I whole heartedly with Apple. Touchscreen on laptops make no sense. The use case for a touchscreen is significantly different from a laptop that it makes sense to have two classes of devices.

Then again, I don't really get the large number of iPads sold either. It seems like an extremely niche devices which would only find a use case in certain types of industry.

Yeah I've never used a laptop and wished I could touch the screen to do something. I don't want to lift my hands off my desk to move something around on the screen. I might not be a good representation though because I don't even like moving my hand off the keyboard to use the mouse

Touchscreens on a laptop are kinda silly, especially if it isn't convertible. I will say though, I use touchscreen gestures to navigate my desktops pretty frequently. Blindly reaching for a three-finger swipe feels a lot more natural than pausing to look down at my Touch Bar and figure out what the hell I want to press...

I use the magic trackpad, that feels more natural that touching the screen. 95% of the time my laptop is docker to a USB-C monitor, so having a touchscreen would be a little weird. For professional use, I'd guess that most people have a larger monitor hooked up anyway. For a touchscreen to make sense, my monitor would need to be touch as well.

The issue with the Touch Bar is the same, that's not a professional feature, or even particular useful. Apple knows this, because you can't buy a magic keyboard with the Touch Bar. If it was useful, the Touch Bar would also appear on the those and it doesn't. I'd love to know how many MacBook Pros are sold with and without the Touch Bar.

Trackpad gestures are great too, I use my Magic Trackpad 2 on my Linux desktop where I don't have any touchscreens. Still though, I think the display as a multitouch surface shouldn't be overlooked. It's pretty much perfect for gesturing.

The best part is that those trackpad gestures translate almost 1:1 from macOS to iPadOS. And you can use magic trackpad with iPad too (although it makes more sense for me personally to use the trackpad built into the iPad magic keyboard case). I havent really used iPad shortcuts before all that much, but once i accidentally triggered a few of them after using it with a trackpad due to the muscle memory from macOS, it all clicked perfectly.

I've had a Macbook with a touchscreen

I installed OS X on my old Asus Zenbook and the touchscreen still functioned... but yeah not once did I ever think "wow I want to apply my fingers to my laptop screen instead of using the large precise touch surface within easier reach" besides for novelty

I'm always surprised at the pushback from people when the topic of touchscreen laptops comes up. I love mine, even if I don't use it a ton. It's a collection of delightful little things: a modal dialog box that I just reach up and tap Okay. Resting four fingers on the back of the display and using a thumb to scroll a web page. Any situation (like on an airplane) where space is limited, reaching for the screen can be better than using a touchpad. I don't use it instead of mouse/touchpad, but I use it as an additional input, and again, it's delightful.

Apple could let customers launch iPad apps on their Macs and use a touchscreen. But they don't, because they'd rather sell you two devices. It's silly, artificial market segmentation.

You could actually get a full desktop experience from a tablet back in 2003, with products like the NEC Versa Litepad [1] running Windows XP. With a fully-fledged x86 processor, you could run anything a desktop could run.

It was pretty neat, but I can tell you from experience that coding using handwriting recognition isn't a great experience :)

[1] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nec-versa-litepad-tablet-pc-vlp...

All of the Tablet PC's running XP Tablet Edition were terrible. I will die on that hill. I tried probably about 10 different versions and the company I worked for was a reseller for them so I got to play with a lot of them. It was just Windows XP with pen input slapped on and it *sucked*.

> consistent undo and redo

Safari history has been broken for something like 4-5 years. About 1% of time back button will take you one step too far (i.e. will show your home page instead of google serp)

Can you drag the cursor with your finger to a specific character in-text yet, without selecting text? 2018 iPad can't.

Long tap space bar and it should become something like a trackpad for the cursor.

God damn thank you. This interaction used to be triggered by deep pressing on the keyboard and it drove me insane when they got rid of it, I couldn't find any settings to turn it back on but this works!

It’s also the same on iphones.

My 2017 iPad Pro can do that. I can tap and drag on the cursor to move it. I can also long-tap and drag on the spacebar to move the cursor like a touchpad. I can also drag with 2 fingers anywhere on the keyboard to move the cursor like a touchpad. The first 2 options also work on my iPhone.

It seems reasonable for "desktop-class" to refer to the basic features that have typically distinguished desktop personal computers from alternatives like smartphones and tablets. What else would you expect "desktop-class" to mean?

I think OP is saying it's strange that many "desktop" applications today lack these basic desktop features.

Powerful features that are more than a glorified ^Z. Reminding actions to finger shortcuts, quick access through a command palette, etc.

It'd be like me calling McDonald's restaurant-class because they could suddenly give you a plate. Sure, it's a component, but the porcelain isn't why I go to a restaurant, it's to have a qualified cook doing things with his expertise.

> What else would you expect "desktop-class" to mean?

For example, PineTab runs full desktop GNU/Linux.

well the Surface Pro runs full Windows

I really struggle to find a use case for the iPad over my Macbook Pro from 2014.

- It sits on my lap with the screen sitting upright without the need for a case to sit it upright - I prefer using a keyboard over a touch screen for desktop like applications and browsing - The trackpad being on my lap or directly in front of me is more ergonomically friendly than having to reach forward to touch the screen

If I was to need to buy another laptop, it would be another Macbook over an iPad.

As a commment on the /r/iPad subreddit said, Apple accidentally made the most future-proof devices with the 2018 iPad Pros. There is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.

I own a 2018 11" iPP, and it has been a game-changer in the way I have studied. After buying it, I haven't printed a single sheet of paper for note-taking. It's also a much better Netflix device than my phone.

I was just thinking this myself. I have the 12.9" 2018 iPad Pro and was considering pulling the trigger on this new iPad Pro announced today. But I really have no reason to, my current one runs perfectly and I've even got the floating keyboard case which is backwards compatible with it. It's replaced my laptop entirely, instead I just ssh into my Mac at home and use vim if I feel like writing some code on the road or from bed.

Honestly have no complaints with this 2018 model, it's one of my favorite pieces of hardware I've ever owned and in fact is what introduced me to the Apple ecosystem (where I'm now fully submersed) in the first place.

Very interesting! Can you please share your preferred apps for ssh/remote access to your home server or Mac? I think I could use that recommendation.

Blink.sh is my favorite ssh app for the iPad.

Sure! I started off using the Termius app for ssh, but ended up moving to Blink. It's been so long that I can't really say why I stopped using Termius, but Blink works really well. It has a lot of built-in bash commands, but honestly I don't find those that useful since I'm not working on local files. I think if Blink had vim built-in I'd use those commands a lot more, but right now I just open Blink and immediately ssh into my home machine. I have a couple ssh aliases set up for that -- one that uses my local network if I'm at home, and one that connects to my home IP address if I'm out on the road.

The only special setup that I had to do on my Mac was allowing ssh connections and adding the public key that the Blink app created for me. When I was on Windows I found that I had to map the command and option keys from my iPad keyboard to my custom vim keybindings, but now that I use a Mac as well that's not necessary.

Edit: here's a picture of my iPad ssh'd into my Mac and editing some F# code. It works well! https://www.dropbox.com/s/ilh16cesqj8ovi9/IMG_7535.jpeg?dl=0

This looks incredibly good. How's the typing latency & bash completion? Thanks for sharing a photo - gives much richer perspective.

If I'm on my home network the latency is impossible to notice, I might as well be at my Mac. Same goes for bash completion, it works flawlessly. Once I'm off my home network it's a slightly different story, it just depends on the internet connection wherever I happen to be connecting from. For example I stayed at a hotel in Fargo, ND a few weeks ago and the latency was fine for the most part, but there were moments where the typing or completion would lag behind by a second or two and then catch up. Almost like lag in a video game.

Blink has mosh in addition to ssh, which if I understand correctly is much better suited to handling higher latency connections like that. I just haven't taken the time to set it up at home, so I can't really say how it performs.

All in all, if you're curious about using the iPad for this kind of thing I really recommend it. I absolutely love mine. Apple is pretty generous with their return policy too, I've returned a handful of their laptops just because I had buyer's remorse!

Nah, good heavens I won't return it :) I have a workplace M1 11in model, but its late for me - so I am going to try this fun project tomorrow.

But thanks for generously replying with so much detail. Much appreciated.

Another vote for Blink. In particular, its mosh support is brilliant.

Short version: after installing mosh-server on the remote machine, you run "mosh remotehost" instead of "ssh remotehost". It uses SSH to establish an encrypted UDP "connection" to the server. If your IP changes, Blink instantly re-establishes a connection. If you pause your iPad for a week and come back to it, Blink instantly re-establishes a connection.

What this means in practice is that I can start doing something at home. Oops, time to leave: I take my iPad on with me on the bus to the office, pair it with my phone, and continue working from the same session. Get to work and switch to Wi-Fi, and I keep using that same session. It's freaking magical.

mosh + tmux/screen is a wonderful UX. The lack of an escape key is less critical on a command line, where C-c more reliably does the same thing (and if you're using vim, try C-[ or remapping the action to `jj` instead of Esc).

My favorite so far has been Prompt2, but I'm down to try others!

> in fact is what introduced me to the Apple ecosystem (where I'm now fully submersed) in the first place.

If you’d be willing to expand on this, I’d be very interested to hear more.

I used to be all-in on Apple devices circa 2010, but drifted back to Windows and Android for gaming & better notification UX (and Windows being a much more familiar OS to me). However, I don’t game on PC anymore, and I’ve become increasingly unhappy with the privacy concerns regarding Google’s ecosystem.

I got a 2020 iPad and the UX is leagues ahead of my aging Samsung Galaxy S9. Given this and the aforementioned privacy concerns, I’ve been considering once again switching to an iPhone and MacBook. Therefore, it would be very valuable to me to hear more about your experiences (and others who have made the same switch and happen to read this).

Fun use case:

My 12.9” eventually had like 30 min battery life and I refuse to spend so much on a legit battery replacement.

Instead I mounted it on the side of our refrigerator to be always plugged in.

Our kids use it with friends to look at family pictures, play multiplayer arcade games, stream music, etc.

It became kind of a mini home console for them (it is mounted lower for their height).

It might be a good model for internet browsing as well, and texting, since it forces open communication as they wean into entering the dangerous internet (for some, it can be as dangerous as learning to drive…)

Apple devices last a long time and get software updates for many years. You really don't need to upgrade unless either (A) the new device has features you want, or (B) your current device stops getting software updates, or potentially (C) you have some new use case that would be more performant on a newer device.

I assume multicore video encoding makes full use of the CPU?

It seems kind of crazy to say there's nothing that makes full use of the CPU.

Do people ever seriously edit video on the iPad?

Oh my goodness, absolutely.

You're not going to edit a feature film on it, but for anything that's just filming a few minutes of different things and editing then together and posting/sending it wherever, it's a godsend.

Whether you're a professional actor taping a last-minute audition from your hotel room, a sales manager putting together an instructional video on site, or a high schooler putting together a classroom project.

Huh. I had completely written off that use-case because literally any time I've wanted to do anything at all, I've found that whatever movie editing software I'm trying at the time can't do it. So instead of wasting time by trying to edit on iOS, regardless of how simple what I want to do is, I always just copy it to my laptop or desktop and do the editing with real software on a real computer.

But maybe there exists better options. I can't say I have invested in expensive video editing software on iOS. (Not that I've ever had to on macOS or Linux though.)

I didn't think the camera was good enough on ipads for decent video, but turn your back for six years and look what happens.

I used to.

For about 6 months iMovie had this crazy bug on my iPad pro that made it extremely laggy.

The software side of iOS is definitely suffering lately, and somethings on the ipad have felt like a downgrade.

I own a 2018 11" and an M1 12.9" and there's plenty of times the 11" has failed to cope with something the 12.9" barely breaks a sweat over. I'm not sure what you do with yours, but it's provably untrue that there is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.

What app are you using that runs poorly on the 11”?

Cubasis / NanoStudio / AUM / AudioBus etc. Anything you can host multiple AUv3 instruments and FX in. The M1 handles many, many more AUs - depending on which ones, probably twice as many or more.

Bingo. I also have a 2018 11" iPad Pro, and the only things that would even nudge me in the direction of upgrading is a landscape-friendly selfie camera (like the new iPad got), significantly smaller bezels, Touch ID (again, the regular iPad has this), and a better display (11" doesn't have mini-LED).

You’re right that the 2018 iPads are great. But people buying their first powerful ipad really don’t want a 2018 machine so Apple keeps improving them. Software improves as time goes on.

Serious question, would you recommend buying a refurb 2018 for modest usage over the new iPad 10.9"? It's about 100nits brighter, a bit lighter with a bit larger screen and supports pencil 2. Looks like they are about the same price as well.

I would, certainly. I'm also using a 2018 Pro. The additional screen size makes more difference to me than brightness; I never have the brightness all the way up anyway.

If you can get a good deal on one, absolutely.

Despite its age, the 2018 iPads still fare very well for most tasks.

What do you use for note taking on an iPad?

I use both Notability and GoodNotes.

>After buying it, I haven't printed a single sheet of paper for note-taking.

OTOH you can buy a whole lot of $3 spiral notebooks for the price of an ipad pro

It depends on what you're planning to do with these notes.

For me notebooks go straight to paper recycling after a while, the space and burden is just too much. Anything I intend to last any devent amount of time is digitized, and scanning notebooks is a PITA.

Sure. But most of my notes are lecture slides as PDFs, and I have e-books also as PDFs. It's much easier to annotate directly on a PDF than to have to print them, annotate, scan, and ensure the scan quality is good.

At some point, 'it's cheaper' is just not a good enough argument for paper notebooks versus the sheer versatility of an iPad.

I would have to buy a veritable cart-load of writing stationery to emulate everything I do on my iPad. It would likely still be cheaper, yes, but it would also be much more of a pain in the neck.

Except at some point those books end up in some storage box in the basement, or potentially tossed out. Digital notes are forever with iCloud/Dropbox/etc and can be searched anytime.

That’s because apple hasn’t introduced any major new features to the ipad pro hardware since then. A 4 year old iphone is also just as future-proof but it doesn’t feel like that since they’ve added many new features to later models.

That's where I'm at - I keep an eye on new releases because I'm a nerd and I like toys. But realistically I'm not going to shell out for them at least until this one stops getting OS updates.

I don't work-work on it, but it does sit beside me all day. Notes, manuals, calls, music etc. Sharing my screen, pulling up a diagram and the pencil is my favourite way to explain things on calls lately. Then I can just shoot them a pdf when we're done to cut out 'n keep.

I see nothing today that changes this for me - just new toys that I look forward to seeing in a few years.

Video games are more enjoyable with the increased processing power!

Where the 2018 model struggles at high frame rates, the M1 version enables more fluid gameplay at 95-120fps. The new M2 would likely deliver more consistent 120fps performance given the advertised 15% CPU and 35% GPU uplift.

Hey, they tried really hard with Stage Manager running so poorly it required an M1 iPad in order to run.

They've since walked that back, and while it is being reworked will be coming to a14 models after all, probably sans the external display support.

> There is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.

Nomad Sculpt. There is no such thing as increased CPU power, often you're dealing with multiple millions of polygons. There is even limitation in the app saying "don't go over X number of polygons" because of CPU limitations. And it's the reason why I'm buying new iPad Pro - to be able to work with more polygons faster.

I (almost) exclusively used “the new iPad” for all my studying and note taking a decade ago. Notability was my go-to app, and I used the touchscreen exclusively. It was a wonderful setup.

As far as I know, this is the first Apple hardware to support Wifi 6E, which is something I've been waiting on for what feels like forever.

I'm hoping the rumored new laptops will also support 6E.

For those that don't know, Wifi-6E uses the 6Ghz band, and I anticipate it will be very helpful in crowded residential environments where lots of Wifi APs are all landing on the same few 2.4 and 5Ghz channels.

I can't understand the emphasis on more bandwidth. The pain with wifi is overwhelmingly dominated by the slowness establishing a connection (why does it take more than a second?!), with connection reliability and latency (for video calls) also being important.

"Wifi 7: 10 Terrabyte/sec transfer speeds" *yawn*

"Wifi 7: Connects in 500 ms, latency 20 ms, tri-band fallover for 5-nines reliability" *Opens checkbook*

All I want is wireless devices that can be connected to my 2.4GHz and 5Gz network at the same time with the same IP.

Dual-band (one device using both 2.4GHz and 5GHz) has existed for over a decade.

That only uses one band at a time, with separate IPs and MAC addresses for each.

That's not what simultaneous dual-band means.[0]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=simultaneous+dual+band

I've never once noticed slowness in connecting as bothering me at all. Are you connecting to new Wi-Fi networks hundreds of times a day or something? My iPad just... stays connected to the networks it knows.

And I believe that higher bandwidth is the solution to better reliability and latency when you've got lots of devices sharing the same router, or other interference. Isn't that how digital radio works?

In fairness, I do notice the time to connect to my home network much more when waking my Macbook Pro from sleep than my iPad. But it is still noticeable on the iPad.

The place where the slowness is most noticeable on iPad is when I want to reconnect it to my iPhone's hotspot. I need to reconnect many times per day because the iPhone turns off the hotspot when its unused for 90 seconds to save battery, and this behavior infuriatingly cannot be disabled.

This is the only thing I’ve missed over the years after switching to Apple. The androids I owned would keep the hotspot enabled all day, apparently without killing the battery.

I notice it all the time. The delay is really annoy when you go in an elevator (so no cell signal) and wait for it to reconnect to your wifi when you step out.

Apple stuff connects faster. Some folks say they "cheat." I think by assuming the connection established before it got a proper reply.

Other OSs don't do that, so it seems like it takes a longer time.

Wifi is still time sliced, right? More bandwidth means more idle time means lower latency, no?

Last time I looked into this, I seem to remember that the Wifi protocol actually had ridiculous hard-coded wait times, e.g, broadcast, listen for 500 ms, then move to next step if nothing heard. I remember being baffled and never understood how that it could possibly be really how it worked, so I definitely might have been misinterpreting.

Maybe you're thinking of a random wait time with a max. That prevents the problem with two sources talking over each other.

Maybe?

> The main purpose of scan is to update/confirm the available WiFi SSID list around the user’s device. There are two types of scan: active scan and passive scan [3]. The active scan is triggered periodically: the mobile device first broadcasts the probe requests, and surrounding APs after hearing the probe requests will reply probe response packets, containing information such as the supporting physical rate. The mobile device will add the SSID of the AP into the candidate list, if it finds that the AP is compatible. In the passive scan, the list of available SSIDs can be updated by beacon packets broadcasted by APs periodically, e.g., every 100ms [4].

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02528v1.pdf

In any case, a good protocol would have random wait times that are still (in expectation) of order the rate at which bits are communicated, not some human timescale.

Relatedly: When I turn off a network by pulling the plug on a router, it takes many seconds for this to be reflected in the list of available networks on my Macbook. I don't think there's a good reason for it to be like this.

Agreed! The thing about 6ghz is that it doesn't travel through walls as well, and tends to have shorter range in general.

On the surface, this seems like a negative, but if you're in a crowded apartment building, it can actually be a major benefit. Even if a bunch of your neighbors end up using it on the same channel as you, you won't experience as much interference because the walls will attenuate their signals.

Of course, a single AP might not reliably cover your entire home in 6ghz, but you can always fall back to 2.4 and 5ghz and/or get more APs.

Additionally, WiFi 6 (and 6e) is better in general at detecting neighboring networks across all frequency bands and reducing interference automatically.

One of my neighbors put in 8 access points for about 1000sqft. Swamped everyone else out. That is what unfortunately will happen. :(

If they're configured correctly, multiple APs on a given network can actually lead to lower congestion, because they can each lower their signal strength to only cover a small area... but it sounds like that isn't what happened here.

8 in a single small home is absurdly excessive. My home is more than twice that size and I only have a single AP (although I have been considering adding 1-2 more.)

I was tempted to just walk over and hand him one of my old ones that covered the apt easily... But they moved out and problem solved itself.

It will be useful until everyone is on 6 GHz…

Pretty surprised they left the front camera on the side of the device. I can't figure out why they would think that makes sense after using it even once. It's so awkward trying to do a meeting and I have this weird camera angle coming from the corner of my face. The alternative is portrait orientation, which puts the camera really far from the center of the screen - feels like it's coming from above or below my face - and puts my video feed opposite to the orientation of my audience's screens, while also not being able to lean on the folded case.

This was the first thing I looked for. iPad is unusable for video calls.

Not to mention video calls (Google Meet, Zoom, Teams) kill the battery on an iPad. Google Meet in particular seems to be about 1% of battery a minute.

On the ARM versions? My M2 air uses very little battery for zoom (1+ hr about 10% or less, don't remember).

They are all ARM.

I have an iPad Pro with A15, and it holds battery better than my M1 MacBook Air on video calls. They are both great though, much better than any x64 devices I have ever had.

Your M2 Air is a Macbook, not an iPad

Yeah, but same processor.

To say it's "unusable" is ridiculous.

It works perfectly fine. Only main difference is that, in landscape mode, instead of people seeing you look slightly down instead of into the camera (like laptops), people see you look slightly left instead of into the camera.

99% of people seeing your image in the call won't notice or care. Especially when things like your lighting setup make most of the difference that people do notice, which has nothing to do with the camera you're using.

Are you saying unusable because attachment to keyboard skews image centering/symmetry?

I use my iPad for video calls (Zoom) all the freaking time and it's fine, but perhaps that's because i have it in the tall orientation so the camera aligns.

Everyone's creepily staring into nothing anyway. Except those of us who try to look at the camera instead of the screen most of the time. Which means we're not actually looking at anyone's face, even though it looks like we are, which is another problem.

Being a bit off-center is the least of the problems with video calls.

This would be solved if Continuity Camera let your iPad use your iPhone camera. Doesn't seem like it does, though.

I was in a meeting the other and one of the participants looked off-center and he said "I joined with my tablet", ah yes was the remark from others

Now, I had joined also from my tablet but samsung put the camera in the center when in landscape mode and got no such remarks and I was just smiling

The camera on the new non-Pro iPad has moved from the side to the top though. Not sure why the inconsistency between models.

They're reusing the old enclosure so they save on tooling & parts.

Yeah this would be an improvement I think, considering how little I've seen iPads used in portrait mode it's a little surprising they haven't done it already. I'm guessing it's to support the pencil charging, since the new iPad does have cameras in the expected landscape location but only supports pencil 1

You are too close to the camera. (Probably because iOS doesn't have good crop and zoom)

The orientation is just a software problem. No reason Zoom et al can't have an option to crop to the right aspect ratio.

Here in Scandinavia, the base iPhone 14 Pro Max, M2 MacBook Air and the new M2 iPad Pro all cost the same: $1,484. Good lord!

lol - they're all basically the exact same thing with a different display

Stepping back and reflecting on the fact this is true is very cool indeed.

In case of the MacBook and the iPad, seems like it’s more about the OS. At least that’s what most comments here are mentioning when comparing an iPad to a MacBook.

They keep on pushing on the power of the iPads. Out of curiosity, does anyone really use their iPads for something they’d consider really compute intensive? I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos. Any time I want to do anything complex or computationally intensive I find a laptop to be much more efficient, both in terms of the OS flexibility and better input devices.

For 99.99% of users, they are 1500 dollar Facebook machines.

You are projecting a bit there

I doubt that. Many very serious artists use Procreate on an iPad as their primary medium, and I honestly can't think of a better tool without jumping about a thousand dollars in price, loath as I am to say it.

agreed. I dont know any tattoo artist without one.

Adobe Lightroom works quite nicely, I use it to edit photos I take on vacation while on vacation.

I don't particularly, but I like to watch videos at 3 and 4x and bigger procs have helped. Older iPads stumbled past 2x.

But, It does make me salty that an M2 iPad can't run Xcode. I wish they would figure that out as it would greatly streamline my setup.

Give me XCode and Preview (I use the pdf page-re-arranging/deleting/etc a lot) and finally put a fucking calculator on iPad OS and I can stop using macbooks at all. I mean for personal devices, at least, I'd still use one for work since they give me one anyway.

> I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos.

I think HN forgets the 'pros' using the iPad Pros are video, photography, visual-arts and music professionals.

I'm as disappointed as the next dev on HN that iPadOS still doesn't allow me to run a full version of Xcode. But then I remember there are perfectly good laptops for that, and I'm not the target audience for these devices

I mean, I don’t understand how I could really use an iPad in my workflow as a photographer. Everything is slower without a keyboard, and for raw editing I use a whole bunch of knobs.

I could see maybe using it at the right type of session to quickly review images on a larger screen, but the last time I looked into it there wasn’t a super great way of doing that. Maybe I could cull photos on my iPad but unless I transfer for the photos to it and then back off I’d need to work over my network and that’d probably be slow…

Everything relating to moving files, SD cards, etc. is just a hassle in Apple tablet/phone world. Ironically, a PC just works.

Same goes for music production. I've tried using a few iPad DAWs over the years, but it's so much slower than using a keyboard and mouse, or just popping open your Macbook with Live. Apple already has a product segment that does fairly well with this market, trying to force the iPad into being something it's not just looks silly.

Producing may be faster on desktop for now because they've had a large head start on optimizing the interfaces for mouse and keyboard, but those affordances are still a subset of what you can do with a touch screen. Touch screens won't replace dedicated controllers with physical knobs, but digital knobs are surprisingly usable.

> but those affordances are still a subset of what you can do with a touch screen.

I disagree. A gesture-based workflow won't replace Pro Tools' keyboard shortcuts, unfortunately.

Touch is far better for performance though. Watching Suzanne Ciani seamlessly integrate her Buchla modular rig with the ipad makes me appreciate just how good the ipad is. A regular computer would be far more cumbersome to use with hardware synths in the moment.

Not really? The iPad isn't velocity-sensitive, and it doesn't have aftertouch or any tactile feedback. A "regular computer" at least has straightforward MIDI routing that you can perform with - the iPad gets outclassed by decade-old Octatracks in terms of performance flexibility.

Ciani is the perfect example that I was about to bring up myself. I got to see her perform live at a conference, and out of her whole setup, she waxed poetic most about her iPad.

Similar things were probably said about smartphones with touch screens being inferior to physical buttons.

After using my tablet as a second screen for production, photo editing, CADing, and coding, it's become woefully apparent that the mouse - a tiny singular cursor - is an inferior grandfather to an interface that _also_ supports multitouch, and the only thing holding tablets back is software. Obsidian is a good example of a mobile app that has parity with its desktop version in both maintaining its keyboard shortcuts but also enabling touch interactions closer to the affordances of physical notes.

Let's check in again in a few device generations.

I see a lot of people using an iPad for music alongside a proper computer with a full featured DAW. You don't need a mouse or keyboard shortcuts for idea generation, sketching out rough concepts from inspiration on the go or playing with some of the pretty unique synths & other tools available on iPad. For modular synth simulation I've found iPad with Pencil to be a much much better UI for me than using a mouse.

Think live performance instead of DAW work. Using a sequencer, effects, or additional soft synths on the ipad along with hardware synths is much nicer than fiddling with a mouse or trackpad.

"Much nicer" is a bit of a stretch (I use a touchscreen laptop with my DAW). The difference between clicking-and-dragging a knob is not that different from tapping-and-dragging one. Same goes for performance; the iPad is not velocity sensitive, and it does not have aftertouch. At that point, you're probably adding in a MIDI keyboard or other hardware, at which point you may as well just perform with a real DAW and leave the iPad at home.

Dodging and burning and masking and using other photo-related tools with a mouse and keyboard feels like I'm producing a very calculated photograph. Using a stylus and multi-touch screen feels closer to the original affordances of crafting and manipulating a physical photograph. For the best of both worlds, I use the iPad in Sidecar / second-screen mode so I can use keyboard shortcuts with 1:1 stylus input.

Oh, I agree about the mouse bit - but Wacom (etc.) tablets have been around forever. I’d also much rather keep my head straight and my arm at rest on my desk all day.

Heck yeah. "Reading" sounds boring and easy, except when you have to quickly skim through 600-page PDFs with illustrations, and switch between those. This is a common use case for anybody designing electronics. I will take every CPU cycle I can get.

The existing iPads were already the best devices for this kind of thing, but faster is always better.

I still find it sad that:

a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"

b) Companies do not ship better iPad apps. At this point, Fusion 360 would work better on this M2 iPad than on most PC machines, but we only get a half-baked "viewer" thing which doesn't really do anything useful.

>Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"

Doesn't faster CPU tend to imply potentially better battery life?

In general, not necessarily.

But in this case the M2 has efficiency improvements, so yes.

This made me wonder: Why do PDFs feel so much slower and bulkier compared to something like viewing HTML over a browser? When it comes to displaying static images and text, shouldn't PDFs outperform HTML pages by miles?

I don’t think it’s true in general, you may just used bad PDF viewers. I can scroll through a content-rich PDF much faster and smoother, than a similarly resource-packed website.

Yep. You can actually use WebKit to render PDFs in Linux and it works perfectly fine as well. Performance problems seem to be most prevalent when you browse them in a web browser.

Yep. With PDF Expert on an iPad, you can instantly see a thumbnail view of your pages, as well as swipe the page slider through 600 pages with a thumbnail being shown for each of those as you swipe.

This does get slower for some pathological PDFs, which is why an even faster CPU would help.

> a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"

Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful. And I don't do any of them, gaming aside (I have a mediocre Windows PC for that, and even that is often using only a fraction of its power for gaming).

The one and only time I've given my m1 Air a real workout is playing with one of those AI art generators, but it's not like that was something I needed to do, or I'd have felt like I was really missing out if I hadn't done it. I did it because I could and it was low-effort.

Faster compiling is nice I guess. That's... it.

> Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful.

Oh, there are plenty — for one, I would really like to have a good CAD/CAM application. Parametric, history-based, like Fusion 360 or SolidWorks. There is Shapr3D which is absolutely amazing and shows what the hardware is capable of (take a look at the demo videos), but nothing I can use for actual work.

These kinds of apps need both a reasonable GPU for rendering and a really good CPU for computing constraints in sketches, and then for recomputing solids.

Unfortunately, Fusion 360 being an Autodesk product, we aren't even graced with an Apple Silicon version on the Mac yet, even though it's been what, two years since Apple Silicon is out? The application is a slow pig, where usability comes last. So I guess I can keep on dreaming.

Or take electronics CAD — having KiCAD on an iPad would be amazing.

Yeah, not a ton, I didn't write none. 3D modeling, cad, running scientific models. Gaming. Hi-res video editing workflows. Machine learning. I guess "crypto" junk. And some of that (machine learning, crypto, probably most compute-intensive scientific models) aren't something you probably want to do on a tablet or laptop except in a pinch, anyway, because a purpose-built server's much better-suited to it and you probably don't need continuous and detailed visual feedback.

But I don't think it's weird that people struggle to come up with ways to really use super-powerful hardware, because most folks don't do (and don't want to do) much of the above except maybe gaming, and most people who do game don't do it—or at least not in a way that's taxing on the hardware—on all the kinds of devices they own.

The cool stuff lots and lots of people actually use tends to end up in dedicated hardware or paths, like video codecs and image processing and face recognition and all that, not mainly processed by the general CPU or graphics power of their platforms.

Most folks don't do complicated video editing or music production, that doesn't stop Apple from optimizing their hardware around that, too. The problem isn't a lack of demand, but rather the inverse - there's so much demand for new software, that Apple can make tens-of-billions of dollars just off the app distribution platform alone.

The crux of all this is having the option to run the software you want on the hardware you own. No, I don't do 3D modelling, CAD, scientific simulation or gaming on a daily basis. But I do use that software sometimes, and a device that excludes the possibility of running any of them doesn't sound fun or "limitless" to me. It all leads to the feeling that the iPad is a Disney-fied version of a professional workflow.

There is Onshape for parametric mechanical CAD.

Civ VI is pretty CPU intensive.

Web browsing is a task you can throw great single-core performance at.

Right now I'm drawing comics using CLIP Studio Paint, which really is a desktop app that runs seamlessly on the iPad (literally it appears to be the same code as what I have on my Mac!)

Each page is ~5000x7000px with dozens of layers including many effects and even 3D models. Even my 2018 iPad Pro breezes through this workflow. With the pencil, it feels like exactly the right device for what I'm doing.

Digital sculpting.

I would play games on my iPad... but there aren't very many that work, because Apple hasn't spent the time (or money) making Metal support widespread. Really, they should just fund / build their own MoltenVK implementation, but I would guess that they don't want to support two paths. It's surprising how MoltenVK only has one full time dev, I could easily see Apple throwing some money at that with huge returns.

> Out of curiosity, does anyone really use their iPads for something they’d consider really compute intensive?

Divinity: Original Sin 2 8)

My compute intensive tablet activities involves a cheap chromebook duet remote desktopping into an actual desktop already efficiently setup for my workflows. I'd rather wait for reliable remote work solutions / infra than try to cope with subpar workflows.

For me this is one of those announcements that I'm excited to see the new version, so that I can maybe buy the previous version ;)

That's not a knock on the new version in any way, just a reflection of how much I value this particular type of device / where I feel I need more power and etc.

I just purchased the iPad Air last week. The model I went for was 720 in my local currency, and after today's shop update is now 850. It looks like the Magic Keyboard also increased from 270 to 330.

I’m probably going to get the 12.9” model. I’m a lecturer and it’ll be very useful for my teaching. Not so much for research where I’m working with stuff like Matlab and OpenFOAM and specialist Windows software for laboratory instruments.

Currently I use my Mac and occasionally sidecar with an old 10.5” iPad Pro so I can annotate my mirrored slides while I go. It works but is awkward. When using a projector over HDMI it’s energy intensive so I need to bring along my Mac’s power brick. Often the display scaling from connecting to the room projector will offset my pencil position, the order you connect stuff seems to matter.

I teach a combination of slides and Jupyter notebooks so I need to verify that everything works as expected.

I could try to use a lightning to HDMI adapter and leave the Mac in my office, but I’m also interested in the LiDAR scanner for some research activities.

I also find the iPad great for bringing along to meetings and labs where you want to sketch stuff out, you can email the result to a student after.

I find it a useful tool for class prep also.

So it’s not a replacement for my laptop, but it’ll help me with a significant part of my day to day activities.

The iPad with pencil is really useful for marking up student papers. I bought one during Covid when everything was being turned in online, but some students still prefer to turn in scans rather than paper.

The downside is that Apple doesn't support user accounts, so I won't use anything that everyone in my family shouldn't have access to. Grading only works because it's easy to log out of Canvas. A lot of the nifty features require you to be logged in with your Apple ID, and I'm just not buying an iPad for every family member who might like to use it sometimes.

I tend to pass my old devices down. My partner has my ancient ‘iPad Air 2’which ddg tells me has an A8X and it is working perfectly for her needs.

Interestingly, the 11 inch iPad Pro still retains the LED display of the 2018 iPad Pro, unlike the FALD display of the 12.9 inch.

Seems like display technology has matured and reached an equilibrium pricing state if even Apple can't justify the cost of investing in producing the fancier displays in a second size.

Maybe it's also because of the cooling capacity of the 12.9" vs the 11" iPad

From what I understand it's the exact same cooling design except the larger surface area and thermal mass of the 12.9, which is almost entirely negated by the larger display generating more heat.

I wonder why developer tools are not a priority for Apple for “pro” iPads. At this point, it uses the M2 chip so the limitations on running IDEs, compilers and other tools just seem arbitrarily imposed.

What developer tools? The ability to create and install your own applications like an actual computer? That would circumvent their walled garden.

I wish they'd just ship macOS as an "app" on their iPads

I'd even be happy with a performant VM app that I could run linux on at this point. It would be so nice to be able to swipe up and go from linux VM -> imessage, etc.

I would assume this would cannibalise mac sales, very doubtful we will ever see compilers on ipad os

If I get a 1TB iPad Pro (16GB of ram) with pencil and keyboard it's $2200.

Without the pencil it's $2148.

If I get a 1TB 13 Inch M2 Macbook (16GB ram) it's 1899.

I have been avoiding getting an iPad because it can't run xCode, and it's cheaper for me to get the laptop.

Sure, some people are buying both, but I'm sure there are many like me that aren't because of this exact trade off.

Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have both stated that they don't hesitate to cannibalize their own products, and Apple has proved that many times over.

Especially at the scale in which iPad having developer tools could ostensibly cannibalize Mac sales — there's no way this would be a factor in the existence of those tools.

We saw a huge push to bring the mac near iOS territory (the Mac Store, gatekeeper, catalyst, the new design language etc.) . If Apple could, I bet they'd exchange every new mac for an iPad and effectively gain the tightest control they could ever get of a huge part of the ecosystem.

There are developers tools for iPadOS, they're just not anything you can do professional work with.

The main problem, I think, is most development tools require a relatively low-level of operating system access that Apple has not figured out a way to do given what they want iOS/iPadOS to "be".

My suspicion is they'll eventually find a way to do containers in a manner that's relatively "safe", and they'll lean on Cloud-based build tools that move the hard work off device.

I keep hearing about the desire for developer tools on an ipad and I just don’t get it. The entirety of iPadOS would need to be overhauled in order for it to be conducive for developer work. What is the appeal of doing dev work on a touch based UI with limited access to the file system on a cramped screen? The Mac is perfectly set up for that work.

What about something like Jetbrains Fleet where its all done on a remote computer but the IDE is local?

I don’t want to use the touch interface while developing. I want to be able to do development on the same device that I can use the touch interface for other things as well, like using the Pencil to markup screenshots or design docs. It seems ridiculous that I still have to carry around a bigger, heavier laptop just for that one final use case.

I also have been using a 13” mac for years, so “cramped screen” doesn’t really apply to me on a 12.9” iPad pro’s XDR. It is more than capable, and I would hopefully be able to plug it into my external monitor at home.

An iPad is more portable than a Mac.

You are saving like a pound and a half

I’ve done a significant amount of coding on a terminal on an Android phone.

> The entirety of iPadOS would need to be overhauled in order for it to be conducive for developer work

I disagree. I used an iPad for sysadmin, datascience, some math, and some web dev. Most of the pain comes from arbitrary restrictions Apple places on iPads. (I’d imagine it’ll get more painful as my eyes worsen.)

The appeal is simple: Being able to develop with whatever device you have on you. A laptop beats a tablet, a tablet beats a phone, and a phone beats pencil and paper.

I want it to just run macOS. The 12.9" M2 iPad Pro is absolutely perfect for me in every way except the gimped OS. The screen is great, plenty of storage, amazing battery life, it's light and portable, WiFi 6E, and a cellular modem. Everyone has their own unique needs but for me this would be the absolute ultimate work device... if it ran macOS.

As it stands I have absolutely no interest. It's generous to describe "Stage Manager" as a gimmick.

I can afford an ipad pro or a macbook pro, not both. I primarily illustrate, but it would be damn nice to be able to compile apps for my ipad.

They wouldn't even need to overhaul iPadOS! All they'd need to do is allow Parallels, VMWare or other folks to make virtualization software for the iPad, and people could just run Linux on it (or - gasp! - macOS). The M1 and M2 Macbooks can run virtual machines without a problem, but iPads are not (sigh) allowed to. Despite Apple explicitly and inexplicably selling 16GB models of the iPad Pro.

I have a Smart Keyboard Folio case, which is super slim and light. My 12.9" 2018 iPad Pro is smaller and light but still has a good keyboard feel. (Note: I have a mechanical keyboard on my home Mac, but can still type like a demon on the thin iPad keyboard. It's surprisingly ergonomic.)

I know there's basically no chance I'll be able to run Emacs or VS Code on this portable little device any time soon, but if I could, it'd be my main device by a long way. There's no hardware limitation preventing it, just artificial restrictions on a "pro" device.

> VS Code

I have had the FOSS version of Gitpods working well on my iPad mini.. if that helps.

I know it's not local, and we're mainly talking about using the local power at our finger-tips.. but, it's an option.

Sure. And if we’re going that route, Emacs in Blink is perfectly usable. I just wish this well > $1000 computer was allowed to run the kinds of software I was running on far less powerful systems. I usually have cell or Wi-Fi connectivity, but sometimes you have an idea on an airplane, ya know?

I'm a student, about to graduate from a BSN nursing program that's online except clinicals. I went from using a Dell laptop to using a Pinebook Pro to mostly using an iPad Air (4th gen) for everything, without making an Apple account (so no installing apps).

The iPad is managed by my uni, who installed the Canvas LMS app. I can read pdfs in the Files app, submit papers written in the Word app, attend class with the Zoom ap. Most of work happens in Safari: watching videos, taking exams, etc. I'm a heavy terminal user, so use a GateOne gateway for ssh access in the browser, allowing me to do most serious work on my user's account on a NetBSD server, working in vim, mutt, sc (spreadsheet), manipulating text with awk, browsing with lynx, managing my website, etc.

A good dock is important. I use the Pinebook Pro usb-c dock with a scroll-wheel 3-button Dell mouse and Model M buckling-spring keyboard. A recent update let bluetooth keep sending music to my stereo when docked. Keyboard shortcuts (like ctrl-a and ctrl-e for moving around the lines of a textfile) are a big part of my workflow. The docked peripherals allow more functionality than the Smart Keyboard folio. I don't like touch screens.

When I graduate, I'll probably fall back to something I like better (my little GPD or old ThinkPad X61), but for school the iPad + folio keyboard + dock + shell account is better than any other single device I have tried.

Going on from all of the comments here about the iPad not being able to replace a computer: it’s true. The I/O is not as good and the OS is lacking in terms of being able to do ‘what I want’ with it. It’s just not a computer. It’s a big phone. With that out of the way, I think it still kicks arse. I grab it when:

+ I just want to watch something (yt, streaming)

+ I want to play some music (great speakers)

+ I want to use a computer in a dangerous place (bath, kitchen bench)

+ I don’t want to lug my laptop around

+ I just want to sketch something

+ Want to read/markup a pdf

+ read a long article on the couch

+ play a game on the bus (Papers Please)

It’s great for these quick sessions. It’s more of a ‘life’ computer, where I don’t have to worry so much about it and it sort of ‘gets out of the way’.

It definitely compliments my laptop but cannot ever replace it.

I really love the versatility of my iPad as well but this single use case you mentioned I can't understand:

> + I want to play some music (great speakers)

Yes, the speakers are fine for their size and certainly good enough to listen to a podcast or talk-heavy Youtube video but I couldn't imagine listening to any music on it. Any budget bluetooth speaker for less than 100 bucks or headphones will sound much, much better.

They’re good enough to just play some music if I’m sitting in the bath or can’t be bothered with a Bluetooth speaker.

Maybe it's my bias as a musician, but as long as Apple doesn't put Logic on the iPad, it's just not a system that works as a piece of professional kit.

No Logic on iPad and the sunsetting of Music Memos... I sometimes feel like Apple is becoming hostile to musicians.

As you know (but others may not), the idea is that you get as far as you can get in GarageBand, then move the project to Logic¹. There's also a way to export a "to go" mix from Logic for GarageBand².

You can get surprisingly far with just GarageBand³.

¹ https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/garageband-projects... ² https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/share-a-project-to-... ³ https://www.melodynest.com/hit-songs-produced-on-garageband/

I have seen some discussions on this post about the use of iPad Pro as a device for actual work, so I will chime in with my experience.

First of, I love the iPad Pro and have been using it for about a year almost daily. I use it for leisure as well as actual work. I am currently writing a technical book, and I decided to do it all on my iPad. I hook up my external keyboard and the Mx Master mouse is paired to both my MacBook and iPad, so I can easily switch.

I initially thought that I would not really like it, but ended up using it as my preferred to device for such work. I can easily sketch things in GoodNotes, and writing with the pen helps me think. I use Termius to ssh into my development machine when I need to write some code, and I use Word to write the text content. I also use the GitHub app although that doesn’t work perfectly so I use the web version as well.

I hardly ever use split screen, so each app is essentially in distraction_free mode. I also notice that I get side tracked way less (no slack, email, or other distractions which I check often on my MacBook). Plus when travelling I only take my iPad now, I worked from airports and hotels only on this device.

I was definitely sceptical about it, but ended up loving it. It actually made me reconsider buying a new macbook, and at this point I would rather upgrade my iPad than buy the new MacBook anyway.

(It is also a great leisure device, depending on what you do. I have Netflix and YouTube on here, and I occasionally draw a bit).

In my day job, I am an engineering manager and it take notes on the iPad as well. Would I switch to the iPad for full Time development? No, probably not. But I do use it for my side projects, and for something like advent of code it is good enough as well.

Seriously, they should bring smart folio back. The one that doesn't have the unnecessary backside but only the side and the front cover.

Did they discontinue smart folio keyboard? Magic Keyboard is almost 2x as heavy.

No, they fortunately still sell it: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MXNL2LL/A/smart-keyboard-...

It's my favorite case.

Do you have an image or link of which one this is?

> Seriously, they should bring smart folio back. The one that doesn't have the unnecessary backside but only the side and the front cover.

I think they mean the Smart Cover option.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQ4L2ZM/A/ipad-smart-cove...

Magnetically attached to an edge, only covers the front when "closed", the back when open, or can be folded up to provide a stand.

Thanks! It looks like it can't cover the back fully the way it covers the front, right? IE the back part is only as a stand and not for protection.

Sort of correct, it only covers the front or the back (exclusive or), not both simultaneously. So when it's being used as a hand-held tablet the back will be covered, but when it's used as a stand the back is mostly uncovered, and when the front is covered the back is uncovered.

I really miss that too! Unfortunately iPads now stupidly have a camera bump

This! (you mean the Smart Cover though)

Apple is pretending weight doesn't matter. They're all clunkers, even the "Air", once you add the keyboard.

My old 12" iPad Pro with the Smart Cover is still lighter than any of the new combos and yet it's heavy compared to certain Android tablets of the same size.

They're awfully heavy for a device that I treat like a dynamic book.

You're right. I messed up the naming and I can't edit the comment anymore.

Yes I mean Smart Cover.

I live pretty far from my parents, and I really want to set them up with a nice video conferencing setup so we can chat as well as in person. I started to spec out a nice setup with open-back headphones, 60 Hz 1080p camera, nice microphone, low latency screen, the works. But this would cost at least $1k, and I'm sure it would be difficult for them to operate. Plus it would be hard to use in certain situations like with children or while eating.

So I've decided to get them the iPad Pro. I'm trusting Apple to focus on things like screen latency and microphone/speaker quality in their products. Plus it should be quite easy for my parents to use. It just seems to me like the iPad Pro is the best product for setting up non-tech people with a decent videoconferencing setup.

Has anyone else solved this problem, or have thoughts on using an iPad for video chatting?

I felt like the system that’s in the portal from Facebook would be the ideal vc setup for my parents (i.e. video calling on a tv). Though, there’s no way I’d want to put a camera from Facebook in my parents house. I did try Google duo (I guess it’s call meet now?) with a Google tv, but since it was with a 3rd party web cam, things like autofocus didn’t work as well as I’d like.

> nice setup with open-back headphones, 60 Hz 1080p camera, nice microphone, low latency screen, the works.

Why do all these niceties go out the window when the alternative is an iPad?

Based on the use case, a simple last-gen iPad should do the job just as well.

Second with what others said, the new standard iPad should fit your bill. It has the ultrawide camera too with people tracking which makes it even better.

For video chat, you don't need the latest. After the camera on my MacBook stopped working, I started using a 5th gen iPad mini. I use it with a stand on the kitchen table, in landscape mode, and it's fine.

Bigger isn't necessarily better. My wife has a full-size iPad and I find it awkwardly big for most purposes.

But for ease of use for the technically challenged, I think something like a Nest Hub Max might be better, since it will automatically point the camera. Caveats: it's not easy to set up for someone without a cell phone (it's technically unsupported), but once you do it for them, it's easy to make a call. Also, weirdly, the video only works when they call me; if I call them it's audio only. (I ask them to call me back.)

Interestingly the Apple Pencil "hover" feature doesn't require a new generation of Pencil — this works on the 2nd Gen.

Overall, this looks like it is clearly aimed at creators. I have the 2018 Pro with Magic Keyboard and have zero interest in upgrading to this model. Honestly I almost wish I could trade my Pro for a Mini, since it's more pocket-able, and I mainly use my Pro for demoing my startup's technology.

It seems like Apple has been embracing the folks who live and die on their iPad full time or mostly full time.

I don't think I could do that now but there seems to be a sizable crowd who works that way and maybe is the future.

> Interestingly the Apple Pencil "hover" feature doesn't require a new generation of Pencil

Yeah, it requires a new ipad.

I'm a bit salty, not gonna lie. This has been basic on wacoms forever.

The iPad Pro is an amazing piece of hardware! But the last iterations make zero difference for most consumers. The hardware improved rapidly over a couple of years. Both the 2017 model (move from 9.7 to 10.5 screen) and the 2018 model (new design without home bottom, USB-C, Gen 2 Pencil) were huge steps. Magic Keyboard from 2020 was a great addition as well and works with the 2018 model. For my own usage, the 2018 model is pretty much feature complete from a hardware perspective. Software makes the big difference now.

I am still amazed by my 2018 iPad pro four years later!

The convergence between iPad and Mac is pretty brilliant. If you think about it, the iPad now has a lot of features that are much better than a top of the line Mac, like 5g and the display tech.

It’s all still too new but if you read the tea leaves we are heading towards a convergence. In the future there will be a device that behaves like an iPad on its own. With an app and touch oriented experience, but when connected to a keyboard and mouse will be like a Mac today. The universal app stuff is a great indicator of them moving in that direction, even if it’s still new.

One thing I don’t really understand though is how a Unix interface will work with a device that is also iPad OS. Like, if you can install stuff from online, eg through home brew, will you be able to side load apps? If that’s the case I think the app experience might suffer, but at the same time if the Unix experience has its wings clipped then what do they plan to replace it with?

I mean that sincerely. I don’t think apple is so naive as to think they can make macs into iPads and not provide an alternative. Maybe they’ll offer a native package manager, one that’s even reverse compatible with brew as a starting point, and then provide an integrated notary process as part of that system for publishing recipes.

Is anybody hooking up a keyboard and mouse to their ipad pro and using it as an interface to a remote desktop running in the cloud? If so, what software stack?

code-server https://github.com/coder/code-server works fairly well and can be saved to the home screen as a web applet to get rid of the browser URL bar. Their are a few UI issues related to touch but it has served well enough for some light work.

You can also use a remote apps like Rainway/TeamViewer/RDP/VNC somewhat successfully to get a more full desktop experience. Unfortunately they all seem to have their own input caveats that take some getting used to.

I am personally waiting for Parsec to release native iPadOS and tvOS clients as it provides the best experience I have found.

It seems like the gaming oriented remote desktop apps (Rainway https://rainway.com/, Parsec https://parsec.app/) are the best though as the latency on the more traditional ones is somewhat of a hindrance.

USB/Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support tends to work okay, but the simulated touch mouse makes getting used to things tough. If you have not tried using iPad OS with a mouse I suggest you look into before making a purchase as it is a fairly limiting experience.

Thanks. I wodner if you could tether an ipad and raspberry pi running Code (which isn't really RDP, but a web app that includes a shell) in a fairly self-contained way.

There are plenty of SSH clients that run on the iPad and code-server works as a fully featured IDE

From the press release: "The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $799 (US) for the Wi-Fi model and $999 (US) for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model; the 12.9-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,099 (US) for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,299 (US) for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model."

> the 16-core Neural Engine can process 15.8 trillion operations per second — 40 percent more than M1 — making iPad Pro even more powerful when handling machine learning tasks

Do people actually use the iPad for machine learning?

Yeah actually, it's really good for inference at the edge. You might be thinking of training though which I doubt anyone does

The high refresh rate being limited to pro models seems like apple deliberately holding back a feature from it's lesser expensive models to avoid it competing with its more expensive models.

Or it could be about profit margins.

Well, why would any business want to have a standout SKU, and hurt their other SKUs? I guess this could also be a tactic, make one model "best feature/price ratio".

For better or worse, there's not "bang for the buck" iPad model. It really scales linearly. The more you pay, the more you get.

New budget iPad - $450 - Doesn't support Pencil 2. Want that? Upgrade to Air. Weakest processor. iPad Air - $599 - Support Pencil 2. Weaker screen technology. Mid tier processor. iPad Pro - $799 - Best of everything (except for MiniLED, which you need the 13" iPad Pro).

It really depends on how much features you can live with.

I would almost want to create a new thread for this, but what is the use case of a tablet? Is this for fulltime physical meeting goers to stylishly take notes?

Is there some benefit to using this over a laptop?

I was on the fence when the iPad Pro M1 was released, it seemed to finally tick off as a laptop replacement for some of my hobbies (photography and music) but unfortunately it is not a desktop OS, not supporting desktop workflows and apps that I'm used to.

If it was a screen-only version of my MBA M1 I could definitely ditch the MBA and use an iPad exclusively, even if it required attaching a keyboard sometimes. The lacking software still makes it much more of a luxury to me than something to actually replace my use cases for a portable computer... I could afford one but see absolutely no usage given that my MBA is already extremely portable and works like I expect.

I know it's very niche and doesn't apply to everybody but I know of a bunch of comic book/comic strip artists that are doing more and more work on the iPad pro and less on their Wacom devices.

For me it’s the form factor.

It’s the perfect thing to take travelling. And on the work side, the pen is astonishingly good as is the app ecosystem.

It also functions as a second screen for a macbook.

Is it necessary? No. Have I spent money in worse? Absolutely.

The iPad boots up in just 1 second. I can do 90% of what I do on a computer on it, at a much more adjustable angle, and it's a lot more portable.

A tablet is integrated into my daily routine to a degree a laptop will never be.

I bought my iPad (non-pro) mainly to play online chess, to read comic books, and for D&D pdfs at the table. It's also a nice web-browsing and video watching machine. The iPad Pro's are a bit excessive for that sort of "consumer" usage though.

The only great use-case I've seen for the pro is 2d digital art. I have a few artist friends who love the pro+pencil.

Music production on one really interests me, but none of my favorite plugins (effects and instruments) that work MacOS/Windows exist for the ipad. They also don't offer enough storage at the high end Komplete 14 Ultimate is 680GB. Each of the Spitfire sample libraries is near 200GB

There are some nice sequencing apps, but again don't need the pro for that, I just send the MIDI or OSC data to a "real" computer running a "real" DAW.

You mention Komplete — is there a Kontakt player or an alternative for ipad? Or do you have a way of converting kontakt instrument into something else?

I think you can get a lot out of ipad as a plugin host, by using IDAM or something like Sonobus. A few FabFilter AUv3s and you've basically saved the cost of an iPad. Plus, the touchscreen for control.

I use my tablet about as much as my desktop and laptop. My use cases are:

(1) Personal entertainment device. When relaxing on a chair or in bed, a laptop is too unwieldy. The TV gets fought over. Pretty much all my movie / YouTube watching is done on the iPad with headphones.

(2) eBook reader. Since my iPad is always withing reach, it makes sense to store all my books on it.

(3) Stylish note-taker. Not a significant part of my use, but I occasionally have stand-up meetings, and meetings in awkward locations, where a tablet makes more sense than a laptop.

(4) Signing stuff. It is much easier to store a document to be signed in OneDrive, open it on the iPad and sign it with the stylus than it is to print-sign-scan.

I can whip out my iPad when I'm on the train to work and watch streamed or locally downloaded stuff, a laptop is way too cumbersome for that even on a semi-crowded train.

With a keyboard cover I can actually use it for messaging, emails, IM and maybe light writing. Using a stylus, I can either take freeform notes or draw stuff faster than I can with a mouse or touchpad.

And in the pre-M1 days an iPad smoked pretty much every laptop in battery performance.

Illustrators/sculptors. It's not as good as wacom+workstation, but I like not being bound to one place.

I know alot of tattoo artists, and they all use ipads for their designs.

Looks really nice, but as a developer I'm unwilling to give that up on my local system! Maybe one day if cloud only becomes a lot better, but even then feels like a downgrade.

I used to be a die-hard iPad-for-coding user, but with the advent of the M1 MBAs I couldn't justify it anymore.

The thing that broke me was that if I wanted a remote development env (because at the end of the day you can't do development on an iPad without some remote computer running stuff for you) at the time you needed to a) provision on via safari manually b) have some kind of script or something on the iPad capable of doing that for you c) have a cheap/low-power computer always running to run the scripts. [This is assuming you don't have a remote computer already you can turn on. E.g. "only iPad + on-demand cloud resources"]

I eventually concluded the M1 MBA is a better option because of how heavy an iPad Pro 12" + Magic KB Case is in comparison.

I still *love* my iPad Pro. The screen is almost a good enough reason to use it. Also it had LTE which was very useful.

I still think it's possible to make the iPad do everything I wanted the M1 MBA to do without significantly changing how Apps are developed or restrictions on iPadOS (and apps like ShellFish, WorkingCopy, and Blink Shell are really my go-to examples of how that could have existed all this time), but while possible today it's just much higher friction and cost to use an iPad to do the same thing an entry-level M1 MBA could do.

Is this using an iPad for coding or is this using an iPad as a dumb terminal and using something else for development?

At the end of the day, that’s what makes an iPad unappealing for me as a development machine. If I am going to pay for an iPad and then rent an affordable VPS just to dev on then why not just buy a computer I can develop on locally right away? Sure, LTE is cool but it probably is more cost effective to go the other way and pay for a hotspot plan for your phone and tether your computer that way.

That being said, I do occasionally feel cool doing dev on my laptop remotely from my iPad using a combination of tailscale, tethering from my phone and using iSH to ssh into an emacs session.

It's still pathetic they won't let you run OS X on it.

Just FYI, it's been called "macOS" for the last eight years. The last OS X was El Capitan.

From Apple's perspective, macOS is a legacy product with the undesirable ability to run software of your choice without giving them a cut.

"Hover" with the Apple Pencil is something that my Tablet PC in 2003 could do. Still, I'm very glad that tablets in 2022 finally have this feature.

Wait you couldn't hover over the ipad and it didn't show you a pointer? The galaxy tablets had this since a few generations, why didn't apple do this earlier?

it seems to be an m2 feature only

Because it is such a CPU intensive task OFC /s

Interesting, if only incremental update. The hardware far outpacing the software continues.

I bought an iPad Pro (M1) about a month ago. I'm glad I didn't wait, most of these upgrades are superficial or would not be noticed by me.

Has there been any recent discussions as to why Apple still hasn't introduced cellular connectivity on their laptops? Is it yet another attempt to get people to convert over to the walled garden of iOS? With every ipadOS iteration, they push it to be closer and closer to a desktop experience (windows, monitor support, keyboard trackpad cover, etc).

I'd wager it's a Qualcomm negotiation thing.

Modern WWAN might be a bit of a nightmare. I'm not super familiar with recent efforts in the space, but if Apple wanted to knock this out of the park, they'd need two things:

- Unlimited data plans, preferably at a non-insane price (sub $50-month would be nice)

- Both 4G LTE and 5G connectivity. Not just one or the other.

Both of these seem technically possible, but I'd assume they'd be incredibly difficult to pull-off from a business negotiation perspective.

Why does Apple need to provide the plan as well? I mean, given Apple's controlling nature, they may well wish to - but most laptops with mobile internet simply provide a SIM slot hooked up to a standard mobile baseband. Customers find their own plan, and many carriers offer plans which are tablet-oriented, with no calls/texts and sharing the data from a 'master' mobile plan.

Not sure how this is much different from an iPad Pro, either.

As sibling alluded to, they don't want to pay the per device royalty percentage, especially on high price devices like a MacBook Pro.

Maybe once the apple designed 5g chips are ready. Maybe they’ll be a little more battery friendly. And apple will either have to negotiate something worthwhile with carriers or start their own mobile network to keep the data prices reasonable. None of the current carriers offer data plans suitable for full time laptop use.

I had an iPad for a long while way back. I bought the Retina one initially.

It was nice for what it was.

I just can’t get excited about anything iOS as unless you have REALLY bought into the “ecosystem” it’s a clusterfuck.

- File management is still a sick joke.

- unless they’ve really changed something that I’m unaware of (which I’ll admit is entirely possible) with “iPadOS” vs regular iOS, multitasking is still a pathetic joke. The state saving and pausing which relegates the devices to essentially fancy task switching and not real preemptive multitasking (other than extremely specific program scenarios and services functionality) which drives me insane. Why the hell does my SSH client have to constantly ping my location to get around the “you can run 13 seconds in the background before the OS forcefully state pauses you”? Why the fuck can’t apple give a nice little “this app can run run run till it’s little heart bursts in the background!” Toggle switch you can control?

People go on and on about iPhone battery life and… there’s a reason for that.

- The ridiculous sandboxing between programs that’s supposedly a security feature but just makes for an insufferably inconsistent UI and terrible management of data between programs … I guess that goes with my file management complaint.

I dunno. I just can’t abide a complete blackbox lockdown of my devices to the point of them being literal appliances. But apparently I’m in the minority there.

Also, most people appear to just be perfectly happy rapidly task switching. And having only most of their programs paused when switched from works fine for them I guess.

I will say for /consumption/ of say documents like PDFs and Comics, the iPad is fantastic. But outside of that basic usage they drive me insane.

Sorry for the meandering rant. I’m waiting for food with my 8yo and bored lol

> File management is still a sick joke.

I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like every time I go to save or open something on my iPad it defaults to iCloud. I don't have a paid iCloud account and find this supremely annoying, especially because the default folder names inside iCloud are the same as in local folders. It's as if they're trying to cause people to accidentally save stuff to iCloud, to get them in the habit of using it (and then paying for it).

I get your point but it's a sane default for most users. They expect their stuff to magically be there after replacing their devices. They don't make any distinction between local or cloud storage and can barely handle folder structures these days.

I wouldn't mind if it were the default once. But after I've saved to device (or box, dropbox, etc.) then it should default to the last location.

> The ridiculous sandboxing between programs that’s supposedly a security feature but just makes for an insufferably inconsistent UI and terrible management of data between programs … I guess that goes with my file management complaint.

I don’t know, I do think that in theory that strong of a sandboxing is superior and would actually like a better implementation of that on even something like linux. Most of my programs absolutely have no reason to read my documents and what not.

I had the first generation iPad Pro. And eventually I gave it to my wife for a lot of the same reasons you list.

Ultimately, Apple will just doesn't want you to separate your data from the app. It's not just that it's a walled garden, it's a wall around you maintaining your data.

My primary tablet usage during the work day is taking notes. With a pen. And I've started organizing my notes into a self-indexed hierarchy of images. And for backup, those images go into S3. I can then just sync any other machine and peruse the images using Digikam which is kind of nice for a free open source app.

Every solution I've found in the iPad just requires you to put your data in some kind of isolated app playground, and then jump hoops to try to move it into any kind of backup system you can access on desktop OSes. I bought a Microsoft Surface, and despite not having worked in Windows in a decade or so, I was able to get my image-based note taking workflow done and set up in a day.

So, this iPad is a beautiful device I will never own. Purely because of their software policies. It's annoying.

Have an M1 iPad Pro 12.9 inch with the Magic Keyboard and Pencil. Obviously won’t be upgrading any time soon(like 4-5 years minimum) and pray Apple understands that users want significantly improved OS software out of the box. Everything I’ve seen marks this as a disappointing software update, especially Stage Manager.

Anyone use an iPad as their daily driver?

I did with the 2018 11” + Magic Keyboard. I felt very capable of doing most day-to-day tasking with the keyboard and mouse. Video calls sucked because the camera is off to the side when in the Magic Keyboard. Stage Manager might help even more, I found the previous “windowing” features to be lacking.

I have been, for backend development only. I live most of my life in Blink shell connected to a Linux machine. Works great as a very expensive dumb terminal. https://blink.sh/

Cons:

- Multitasking is weak. You can put two windows next to one another as long as you want them to be in a vertical split. The "pull out" side window feature doesn't work on the home screen for no discernible reason, so if you have Things in the side app then open it from the home screen, it's no longer opened in the side app and you have to manually move it back. (append: I haven't tried Stage Manager yet; maybe it will address some of this)

- Hardware keyboard support is pretty weak. The settings app and shortcuts app are two examples of apps with bad keyboard support. The "full keyboard access" is a very strange modality: it turns tab into a chording key. There's no equivalent to "focus all elements" as there is on desktop, so for example if I press tab from this text box, the "reply button" is not selected; the search at the bottom of the page is.

- Web access is a must. Individual apps might provide offline support, but many have sub-par sync systems, where you'll discovered that your offline files have helpfully been completely deleted and require resyncing, but since you're already on the plane by that point you're out of luck.

All in all: works great as an expensive dumb terminal.

I use a 5th gen iPad mini for web, email, telephony, ebooks, photos & video capture, but I use older Intel Macs (MBP 2010 & mini 2012) for local media server, storage, photo and video editing, torrent, file manipulation and transcoding, word processing & desktop publishing, pdf generation & editing, VM & emulation, and all the things that iDevices won't easily or gracefully allow or anything I happen to prefer on macOS. Granted, with effort, one can do nearly everything on iDevice, but it isn't always convenient. But upwards of 90% of the things I use Apple technology for is web browsing, email, and watching a movie or tv show, and this incidentally makes my Macs more secure and less needy of administration. I would like to have a new Mac, but I really can't justify it because I no longer use them for web and email, all the old Mac software can still do what I need it to do, although heavy processing takes longer, because the Macs are really in the background, it doesn't slow me down.

Been using my iPad pro 2017 12.9 since 2015. It's basically my email/web/books/video/social device, but also can do work stuff in a pinch. It's not ideal for work, but it's more practical than my 12 mini if I need to do emergency stuff.

I also use it for presentations, sketch out designs and architecture, etc, but it's harder to clean up documents on the iPad because the editing on it is awkward compared do a laptop. For certain things diction works, but just copying and pasting a couple of rows in excel (or any spreadsheet like thing) is just really bad.

That said, the tool you have with you is the best tool, and it's really portable. It's 7 years old at this point and still going strong. It won't use a bunch of the new features in 16, but since I don't use those anyway I don't care.

If you want to test out an iPad, pick up a 1st or 2nd gen iPad Pro. I have three of them around the house (including mine) and the other two get used all the time for video/games/browsing.

My brother does, his just broke and has been waiting for the new release. He's a teacher and just uses it for email, grading papers, etc.

Some things work great on the iPad, and for those things the iPad is absolutely fantastic and I will often prefer to use it.

If you want to infinitely scroll, the iPad is unparalleled. It is great for reading and watching. I like it as a game device. It is great for reading news and I enjoy apple's news widgets. Kindle works well. If you want to consume, the iPad is an amazing tool for consumption.

Additionally in the last year, apple made it really easy to use your iPad as a second screen, either as an iPad or as a literal second screen for your macbook. I found myself doing that more and more.

I bought the apple pencil thinking it can't possibly be worth the money, but it is an enjoyable device to use. Writing text on an iPad is more gimmick than feature (for me), but I find it a pleasurable way to scroll or navigate apps.

That being said, once you want to do a task with a keyboard, there is no replacing a laptop. The iPad is also locked down (no terminal, only safari) such that a laptop is still necessary. The iPad is still very much a luxury device and could not stand on its own. Phones and laptops both have features that the iPad does not have that make them necessary. The iPad offers nothing that makes it necessary unless you consider an ancillary screen for your laptop necessary.

I did for ~5 years but switched to the m2 air, complex tasks and multi tasking are much much easier, as well as dev work which is possible in a very limited way on iPad. I always used it with the keyboard attached and the laptop has a better hinge for screen angle too

Only as an e-reader, mainly because I lost my Kindle between moves. Other than that I don't use it for much.

You need to really need to a use touchscreen and/or a pen to justify such an extravagance.

Or you just prefer the form factor overall to a similarly-priced MacBook. I much prefer my 12.9" iPad Pro (I have a 2nd generation one, from way back in 2017) over a comparable MacBook Air. This new iPad Pro is a tempting upgrade for me, although my 2017 device is still working fine which does make the expense difficult to justify.

Best feature not really mentioned is Sidecar! Having a second high quality screen has been a game changer. So portable and so powerful. I will be upgrading my 2018 12.9 iPad Pro to the latest. Mostly for the better screen to match my M1 Max.

Thunderbolt!!

As usual I'm envious of this hardware, & wish the rest of us who aren't ok in Apple's tight walled garden had options half as good.

The M2 is a great chip. Yeah, sure, way better than anything else & ridiculously great for a tablet: yes. The display is amazing, as usual. What is new & exciting to me here is Thunderbolt. For so long, "mobile" devices have not had any of the perks of modern computing when it comes to connectivity. Being able to connect to other devices via a modern high speed cable is a kick ass feature that enables all kinds of advanced uses.

With things like Steam Deck, I'm hoping we see a little less strict siloing & see mobile devices start to get competitive in interesting ways. It's a fantastic device: for $400 it blows almost every phone out of the water in almost every conceivable way, wipes the floor & makes mock of what we get. We should have higher expectations, see more cross-market products, but we've been locked into very tight market segments for a long time. One other category busting device I'd cite- really interesting- is the Lenovo Legion Phone, an ultra-serious gaming phone from 2021, which has dual batteries, cooling fans, a 144Hz OLED screen & tip top specs, but most genre-busting of all: a phone with two USB-C ports. Do it. Make your phone a connectable device! Go next level!

I'd love to see a betting pool on what quarter we first see a phone with USB4. Anyone here wanna bet on anytime in 2023? Personally I still think anytime in 2024 is only like 60/40 odds yes. There's little impetus to try, to do better, to make, even though it's so near. Even though the chipspace is tiny. Even though the IP isn't that costly. There's no perceived market, and that belief keeps the market for advancement from occurring.

I love thunderbolt here. The irony is that Apple is one of the most closed ecosystems with the least potential by far to make use of the wide range of nearly-anythings someone could plug in via thunderbolt. Ideally Steam Decks and phones should all be able to make fine use of eGPUs, NICs/infiniband/whatever adapters. They should all support CXL too, but we'll see this, like all the other good stuff, segmented off to servers for 5 years, then desktops for 5 years, before finally it becomes clear & obvious consumers would have great benefit & that it's simpler, more powerful, more flexible to use the good high power specs for these mobile consumer devices too, & we've been shorting ourselves this whole time for no real good reason.

Pretty boring announcement, biggest things is that Apple finally has stock of Broadcom 6E radios so you can expect those going forwards, and that ad expected Apple couldn’t manage to get over 600nits on their small screen device.

I like how it says

> Wi‑Fi 6E and 5G

So 10Gb and then as an example directly under it shows a news article with a couple small images in it lol. Personally what I'm really waiting for is 40 Gb to load my news articles.

I was told to expect wireless charging for these. I was excited about this, because my mother has an irrational "thing" about wires, and an uncharged iPad is a useless iPad.

There are many lightning charge docks [1]. Maybe something like that could work, if securely mounted to the back of a table, to hide the hanging wire.

Wireless charging pads also have cables. Do you hide them in table surfaces?

1. Random example: https://www.belkin.com/th/chargers/wireless/charging-stands-...

Yeah, this is what I think I will have to go with, much as I dislike it.

Lots of iPad hate in the comments. But remember, if nobody wanted them, they wouldn't keep selling as well as they are.

If you have no interest in an iPad, don't buy one. For me, it's not going to replace my general purpose computers any time soon, but its great for reading or carrying around while on the go for short bursts of work (SSH/Mosh with Blink app, RDP with Microsoft Remote Desktop, VNC with Screens, etc).

I would love a way to enable Safari DevTools on this device so I could use it to debug iOS specific quirks instead of needing an Apple laptop.

Get a Mac Mini, stick it in a closet and VNC into it, that's what I do.

Yeah I would think a Mini would be a better use case than a whole laptop.

Then you emulate iOS on it to debug iOS Safari? Is it fast enough?

Yea, it works well and is plenty fast on a LAN (remote may be laggy). Some things you can't test using emulators, namely App Store stuff I believe, and you need to screw with the resolution/scaling so you can read the text.

I threw a GitHub runner on mine so I can do iOS builds from it.

If you are needing it for web dev, the Inspect browser on iOS works great for that purpose. It is annoying you have to pay $10 for something that should be built in.

Is that a paid extension?

There is also one called literally "Web Inspector" from "And a Dinosaur" or something which I believe is free and a Safari extension which pops up devtools on my iPhone

Question from a gen 1 iPad Pro user (first USB-C iPad):

Is the usb>hdmi output still a disaster?

I noticed a huge downgrade in compatibility from my previous ipads doing presentations with the lightning port.

I even diagnosed an issue where the iPad pro would not output to HDMI using Apple’s official dongle if the HDMI cable was longer than 25 ft. Ha (iphone/lightning adapter worked fine in the same setup).

Illustrator here. Very frustrating that hover cursor is new-device only. Here I was hoping for an apple pencil V3. I figured it would be a $200 upgrade, not sell-current-device + $1200. I've got a top of the line 2020 (all specs max) and it seems to have lost about half of its value going by ebay prices.

With iPhone video hardware, ProRes support, and a thunderbolt interface that makes 4k ProRes actually practical to get off the device, the iPad Pro is now likely to be the best video recording device for certain creative niches. You can even edit the video on the same device that captured it in a pinch.

So... what's the use case for this, versus say an XP Pen or Wacom graphics tablet and a Macbook?

The more portable nature?

I remember I used to read a lot on my tablet before I started using anki to take notes as I went. I miss it, the screens and then light weight are very easy on the eyes and hands. Reading on a laptop isn’t nearly as nice, but you can’t beat the keyboard

It has IEEE 802.11ax WiFi6E, first Apple device with it, apparently. Even the M2 MacBook Air and the Mac Studio don't have it.

Edit: only dual-band. no 6GHz? WTF, Apple? Definitely skipping this generation, then.

If you only use communication tools, web based apps, Word, and only need to be able to open/tweak an excel or PowerPoint doc, then yeah they’re awesome, anything more and you need a laptop.

Anyone have iPad Pro screen protector recommendations? Looking to get one of these and worried about screens getting "softer glass" and would rather have a sacrificial layer on top.

I wanted the "paper feel", which gives the screen a bit of roughness so it feels like writing on paper rather than glass. I went with this brand on Amazon and have been very happy with it:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N362JCW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

I bought it 18 months ago and still haven't needed to replace it. I can clean it as easily as the bare screen.

These types of layers add a very tiny amount of color distortion, so I guess not recommended if you do professional graphics work on the thing.

I've generally been pretty happy with JETech's screen protectors, not happy with where they come from, not happy they appear to be a random amazon no-name brand, but I've been pretty loyal to them and when I've deviated, mostly to protectors bought in person, I've noticed a drop in quality.

Best Buy does lifetime warranties on some of the screen protectors they sell. I have them on my phone. They’re not mind blowing but they have changed them for free for me no questions asked before.

How large a piece of the chip is that 16 core Neural Engine eating? I'd rather have a more powerful CPU + GPU or am I missing the point a bit? Anyone care to shed some light?

Imaging what a great product we would have if Apple ditched the Mac and put all that hardware and software effort towards a unified touchscreen convertible tablet.

meta invests in vr goggles, apple invests in high definition. none of them invests to replace the keyboard with someting better , not worse. Computers are not useful without communication, and the slow human-computer bandwidth is the real bottleneck for these devices. Keyboards (and mice) are still better after 4 decades . Meta's wrist device might be the revolution we need

It is hilarious to me that apple keeps adding accessories to the iPad to make it look more and more like a laptop.

The iPad is a very bad laptop, but is a great tablet.

No horizontal camera is a dealbreaker for me at this point. I know it’s minor, but that would truly let me leave the laptop/desktop at home.

With the number of cameras on an iPhone, I'm surprised they don't just add a second.

Is it possible to use iPad with Safari and VSCode? I'm thinking about something like GitHub Codespaces. Like development in browser.

Code server might be what you're looking for: https://github.com/coder/code-server

The caveat with the above is that you'll need something to host it. You could use a computer on your local network or a VPS of some kind (DigitalOcean, Linode, etc all have cheaper plans for hosting).

Once you get Code Server running, you can add the URL to your homepage to remove the Safari URL bar.

Try GitHub.dev on your iPad now. Totally possible. You can save a link to it on your Home Screen. It’s not a full time workspace but a decent backup option if on the go.

I don't really own good iPad unfortunately, just trying to understand its capabilities.

Can I attach proper 4K display with keyboard and mouse if necessary? Will it work like desktop (when it comes to browser)?

While I don't really think that iPad is a good replacement for Macbook Air, that's an interesting option at least.

Isn't stage mode the main star of the show? It looks like the first baby step to have an actual desktop environment on the ipad.

Would have bought it if it had a headphone jack. As it is, there's nothing here to get excited about over my M1 Pro.

I was pretty skeptical of AirPods. Now I could never go back.

I use my iPad for making music, the latency on AirPods or any other BT headphones makes them a non-starter. It makes me actually angry that they removed the jack from the iPad "pro", killing one of the very few actual pro uses for an iPad.

I’m not knowledgeable on hardware/music, would an usb-c to jack converter decrease quality/increase latency? I know that it is still a bad option as you may want to charge it at the same time.. Maybe those usb-c dongles used primarily in macs? They often have jack as well, would that not be a good replacement?

It’s a replacement, but not a good one. If you want good sound quality and the ability to charge at the same time then it’s quite a bulky dongle. The audio quality varies massively too, so if you mix / master on one and then it breaks, you have to replace it with the exact same one otherwise your next mix / master isn’t going to match the last one. And if they’ve stopped making that one, you’re screwed. All of these are problems Apple have created for pro users of the iPad Pro by removing the jack.

Pro users use audio interfaces. The headphone jack is useful for quick improvised sketching or listening but Apple's official dongle will be fine in those situations as well. It's actually a pretty well made DAC for its size: https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...

For any serious work you'll probably be around a decent audio interface anyway.

I've got several high end audio interfaces, but they're not much use on a plane or a train.

Attach the adapter to your headphones. Done.

Yes, it's slightly more inconvenient but I wouldn't dismiss the whole product due to a missing port few people (including me) use these days.

It is attached to my studio cans, but that doesn't solve any of the problems I outlined above about varied audio quality between different adapters etc.

For some numbers:

First gen AirPods Pro have around 130ms latency. Headphone jack has around 50ms. [1]

I can't find any measurements for second gen AirPods Pro.

1. https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/tech-news-airpods-pro-latenc...

Try playing in time with 130ms latency.

Still digging my Galaxy S21 being a desktop experience over an HDMI cable.

But I'm probably switching to a Samsung phone that folds.

I'd love to see this explored more, it seems we have such power in our pockets, all we really need is devices to attach this too rather than more devices with the same cpu/memory and gpu's.

Particularly when you look at Apple devices, if you own multiple apple devices you have several devices with A or M series CPU and GPU's.

Any signs of a new MacBook Pro 16" with this announcement (or any indication of when we may hear something)?

Apparently M2 Pro will launch in November, not October https://www.tomsguide.com/news/new-macbook-pros-with-m2-pro-...

The stage mode looks like an interesting attempt for desktop like productivity with an external monitor.

> delivering the ultimate combination of portability, versatility, and unbelievable performance

Not with that OS

I want to try the M2 on the iPad for stable diffusion photo editing.

Who will make that app first?

Is it possible to run virtualized linux on these and have all hardware stuff working?

Not yet. best so far is UTM.

But does UTM support OpenGL powered by the M2 GPU?!

And off topic but what about connecting a mouse to this thing?

And what about compiling apps on it!?

What about running OpenGL on non emulated linux on this?

I know the GPU is being worked on but do the old OpenGL parts work allready or is that part of the reverse engineering?

I wish you could change batteries yourself... hopefully they have moved towards that: 3/10 on the old one: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad+Pro+11-Inch+Teardown/11...

AFAIK there is nothing being worked on. I would be VERY interested on a faint glimmer of hope of linux being possible on Ipad Pros.

https://news.itsfoss.com/linux-gpu-driver-apple/

That's only targeting the OSX based systems unfortunately. No iPads.

Noooo, but wait... that doesn't matter linux doesn't care... M2 GPU is all that matters...

I mean it will be ported to iPad Pro in a week.

Edit: You are right: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/rar2uh/will_it_...

They will crack the bootloader eventually!

Dear Apple, Does the new iPad case have a place to store the pencil when traveling?

Apple will not make a case with Pencil storage, but Apple sells multiple third-party cases which do (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HPKU2ZM/A/stm-dux-plus-fo...), and you can find hundreds of vendors which will sell you one.

What I found best is a strap with a narrow pouch sewn into it.

First time for Wi-Fi 6E on Apple hardware. Expecting that in the new MBPs as well

Still no "Liquid Retina XDR" display on the $800+ 11" iPad Pro :(

It, as with the last gen iPad Pro, does have Liquid Retina XDR:

Last gen: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212527

This gen, right on the product page: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/

The first page isn’t for the 11” model, and the second page claims it has a “Liquid Retina” screen capped at 600nits not a “Liquid Retina XDR” screen.

My bad. I completely missed the 11" there. And, I didn't realize there was a difference. That is disappointing.

Still no torrent app possible = no buy.

Hopefully the EU breaks Apples‘ App Store Monopoly.

It's nice they keep working on making iPadOS more useable. But it seems like a waste of time to me.

Just let iPads run MacOS already.

(or put the nice touch screen on MacBooks, same difference)

If it's too awkward to use macOS without a keyboard and pointing device then, sure, maybe MacOS mode isn't the default.

Try using Sidecar for any substantial amount of time and you’ll realise just how awkward macOS is without a keyboard and pointing device.

It's not like the iPad Pro doesn't have nice keyboard and pointing device options.

I remote into MacOS and Windows machines from my iPad (12.9" iPad + Apple's keyboard/trackpad case + Jump) and it works well.

Desktop app and I still see no Logic Pro X on the go. Disappointing

Can this actually replace a MacBook for a backend engineer workflow?

No - but it's closer than ever, yet still probably years away.

github.dev works fine on an iPad - you could integrate with their new codespaces service to run dev servers for web projects. So it easy available fancy remote terminal. If you’re traveling with just your iPad, this is a nice secure option where you don’t need to have clones of repos locally or any keys saved locally to your device.

How long does the battery last? Comparing to the MacBook Air?

From the tech specs: Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video. 9 hours if using Cellular data.

which in comparison is about half of an air or pro.

I was waiting for a Macbook Pro M2 2022 announcement... :(

Pretty much everyone here knocking the iPad Pros for being consumption-only passive entertainment devices.

But I guess the artists, musicians, video-editors and photographers using them professionally would disagree, if they ever came here.

It’s a big issue with the audience of this site being too hyper focused on software development.

You can see it taken one step further in threads about GitHub Copilot getting torn to bits but the threads on Stable Diffusion getting lauded as the end of artists.

It’s the double standards that come up when people fixate only on what they know well themselves.

Yeah... I like Copilot for helping me with specific coding/data entry tasks, and I like Stable Diffusion for helping with my art workflow (I'm also an artist). I tend to keep quiet about such opinions on here, though, because I know I'll get downvoted into oblivion for heresy.

My criticism of Apple is that it is a closed environment and you get dependent on one manufacturer that is already using its position to demand high prices and doesn't really make you the owner of their devices. This conflicts with engineering in general all over the place for numerous reasons.

Industry automation relies on Windows, which isn't optimal as well, but it still is a far more open system. I hope they don't try to copy Apple. In-house advertising uses Apple for designs and that works decently well. Apple is seen as cool, but it is sometimes hard to integrate them into workflows or more serious work on data.

iOS and it derivatives are simply a toy OS and very unflexible. There is one solution to almost everything and in most cases it works. But that is more or less the end.

And kids. My daughter is using her iPad extensively, and not only for games - she is drawing a lot, and her current CPU is already pushing the limits in some sophisticated drawing apps.

I am a hobbyist video editor and I am excited for this iPad. I never thought I would see Davinci Resolve come to it. Especially before Final Cut.

I use it everyday for handwritten math. Unfortunately, the software is meager compared to the hardware.

I use the LiDAR of the iPad Pro to capture full schematic of room in 3D to prepare spatial datasets.

It isn't perfect. The sampling rate of iPad Pro is still lower than professional 3D cameras, but I can't complain when they cost a fraction of the latter. 3DScanner and similar apps do a great job at stitching the volumetric data on the fly & rendering on iPad itself (before I transfer).

We use these data to do some inference via 3D computer vision projects for clients

Do creative types use Ipad Pros? The IPadOS file system is less than optimal. Adobe apps are the real thing and missing features.

My company has a full video team, and photo team. No one has asked for an IPad Pro. They do have proXDR screens and some beefy macs. Only execs have them for a high end zoom boxes especially if they have a windows laptop that have poor mics and cameras. Center stage feature is really nice.

Now ask the full video team to spend 30 weeks of a year travelling around the world, producing video on locations.

I bet you they won't want to lug around the proXDR screens and beefy macs at that point.

They'd probably go for a MacBook Pro that has the software they use before an iPad.

Are there any creatives that don’t work in industry? Video teams that use Mac Pros and Pro Display XDR wouldn’t even be able to use a MacBook Pro does that mean the MacBook Pro can’t be used by creatives?

So yes, creatives use the iPads. It is the main driver for more performance on an ipad. Drawing, audio performance, photo editing, hell, they are great second displays for MacBooks.

This thread was started with a comment about iPads being used by professionals in these industries.

> Pretty much everyone here knocking the iPad Pros for being consumption-only passive entertainment devices.

Yeah, this criticism has never made sense to me. I think it could only come from people for whom the only purpose of computers is to make software, not to get out and... you know, do things with the software, in the actual world. I-devices excel at that. They are excellent computers as tools for doing things that aren't focused on locally testing docker containers or whatever we all do in our day jobs that require less-portable and kinda-dumber (their "view of the world", if you will, is much more limited) desktops and laptops.

I'll give you that artists use them for drawing.

But professional musicians, video editors, and photographers? All the software for doing any of those things is kneecapped versions of Mac apps. If they use an iPad at all it's as some kind of supplementary tool for the real machine the work gets done on.

It's very frustrating that you can't even do simple operations on files that were standard on the '84 Macintosh. I'm not talking about rocket-science or a git-based build system.

I had high hopes for the Files app when it debuted, and was very disappointed.

The thing is, is the iPad really the best device at the price point for these people? Artist seems like the only one.

- for a musician, surely the full featured desktop software is better? And for $800 you can get a pretty good laptop - video editors must also prefer a desktop OS. They can use keyboard hot keys, industry standard software, and get better GPU hardware - photographers might do pretty well with an iPad Pro but again I think they’d probably still be best with desktop class photoshop - a casual artist I will contend probably does best with an iPad Pro. But if they start doing really serious professional work, they will again probably want the full desktop software and an expensive Wacom hardware to go alongside

So at both casual and professional levels, the iPad Pro really only makes sense for a casual illustrator from what I can see.

> But I guess the artists, musicians, video-editors and photographers using them professionally would disagree, if they ever came here.

I do. But be glad we generally don't, it would probably lower the quality of discussion.

Still no NFC?

This isn't surprising, but it's unfortunate -- Apple still hasn't even opened up CoreNFC on the Watch.

I have a custom app for my business which uses NFC, and it's a bummer that iPads, and just about no modern Android tablets have NFC, so while I'd love to use a tablet to do certain tasks, I can't.

What’s your use case? I’m imagining people holding a 12in iPad by a door keypad or Apple Pay terminal fumbling around trying to find where the sensor is (I’m not being very creative with this I realize)

Our coffee machine isn't free anymore because of extensive usage, but we can pay with any NFC ID we register. My primary use case for an iPad is as a coffee coaster too, perfect synergy.

Still can't believe the M2 chip is hobbled with Stage Manager.

Dear Apple,

I want my iPad to become a Finder based full-fat macOS when it's on the Magic Keyboard and I want it to be Springboard when I take it off the Magic Keyboard.

Make it happen already.

Yeah, I don't really know who Apple is hoping to sell these to. My ex-boyfriend bought one of the earlier iPad Pros with some grand ambitions, but he mostly ended up using it for Netflix, Twitter and emails. I think that totally legitimizes the existence of the smaller/cheaper models, but who is Apple selling these to in the long-term? Even the mediocre Surface Pro has a decent software experience that explains why someone might continue spending extra on it. But I don't know who the iPad Pro is for, especially these souped-up models. 120hz is nice, but... who the hell is going to need or even appreciate a high-refresh rate on an iPad? I reckon most "pros" would be happier if they sacked the high refresh and upgraded the panel to a 60hz OLED one.

I'm just spitballing though. The iPad probably won't make sense for most of us until it's discontinued or they add macOS to it, whichever comes first.

The extra 2 inches of screen can be a reason to get a Pro, but I agree it's unclear why they both to put in so much horsepower.

as an avid comic book reader, the 12.9" iPad Pro is _perfect_ for reading comics, you don't have to zoom in or out at all and you can simply read. The 11" model might be fine too but I've only ever used the 12.9" model. It's slightly oversized, like the treatment some of the deluxe hardcover graphic novels get, and it's absolutely glorious to be able to read without zooming in.

I'd love to get a newer iPad, but the price is bananas for me given the use case. I bought the pre-2018 model and it's still holding on but I'm going to be bummed when this one reaches the end of it's usable life due to software updates and such because I can't afford (or, justify maybe) one of the newer models.

> as an avid comic book reader, the 12.9" iPad Pro is _perfect_ for reading comics, you don't have to zoom in or out at all and you can simply read.

The really cool thing about this, for those who haven't tried, is that in landscape mode the 12.9" is really really close to the same size as a two-page comic spread, so you can read them like they were intended, not one page at a time. It's a little smaller, but not much. Makes a huge difference vs. page-at-a-time reading.

(I use Chunky, which is amazing and I wish the author charged money for it or had more options to pay them than one mostly-unnecessary and really-cheap IAP, because it's really good and I never want it to go away)

What do you use to read comics? When I was looking into it some months back the best readers of the past were all unmaintained and didn't work properly and the newer apps wanted to charge me a monthly fee to read comics from local storage with no option to buy.

I use Chunky. It still works great.

I've heard Panels is decent as well.

I think the 11" is too small for comics. I typically have to zoom in, or use the mode that managaes the zooming in and scrolling for you.

I bought a 2G ipad pro and it was very useful as just a writing tablet. Unlimited paper, though I had to get a paper-like screen protector since otherwise their wasn't enough friction between the screen and the pen to make me happy.

I'm disappointed there aren't more pen-based programming experiences out there, but I can't really think of any useful ones myself either.

For writing, have you checked out the remarkable? ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24295443 )

It's an e-ink display with paper like friction and if you really want to, you can shell into the linux system it runs on.

I’m not the op, but I am a “pen based note taking enthusiast“.

I have owned both a gen 1 remarkable, and an older iPad Pro. In my opinion, the remarkable is garbage in comparison. The note taking app is just so far behind. And cross platform seems it’s never going to happen.

My note taking app of choice is always: write, by stylus labs. It’s wonderful, and really expresses what I hoped pen based writing would always be. Especially the undo-wheel. For quickly scrolling back a whole word or sentence. But the real killer here is that it’s cross platform. I can move the notes to the native Linux app or the native windows app.

That having been said, I am forever annoyed that I can’t run Xcode on either Linux or my $1000+ iPad. Also, on the iPad, there are ridiculous restrictions in how you are allowed to run apps side by side in split screen.

/sigh

So the race for the good pen note taking device is still on for me.

I have hope that soon the Pine Note will take off and allow me to finally run write by stylus labs on a platform with development tools. In this case Linux.

Again, Apple could win me back by opening access to dev tools. Either in the iPad itself or cross platform on Linux/windows—or by allowing me to install macOS on the iPad.

Remarkable could win me back by opening the platform and allowing my to install write by stylus labs.

Dell or Lenovo could win the race by shipping a 2-in-1 with a current generation processor and Linux officially supported, and preferably pre installed.

But it honestly looks like pine 64 is out in front in this race.

Have you tried the Pine Note? As someone who really likes Pine 64, and has a PineBook Pro along with a couple of Pine Time watches in my device petting zoo, it's worth pointing out that when they say something is only suitable for early adopters, they *really* mean it.

Make no mistake. Their stuff is great. But I'm not buying something they tell me is for early adopters unless I want to write code for it and use JTAG to load that code, possibly with a handbuilt wiring harness.

I haven't tried the Pine Note (yet).

Like you, I'm willing to take Pine64 at their word that they are still "crowdsourcing system level software". I am eagerly awaiting their monthly blog update/podcast. Tragically, last month's update didn't happen. So, we've all been a little in the dark.

> Remarkable could win me back by opening the platform and allowing my to install write by stylus labs.

It's linux under the cover that you can connect to if you know the password (in the settings).

There's a whole bunch of apps that you can side load into it.

https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

I'm not sure there's anything preventing you from installing write by stylus labs other than that no one appears to have ported it to the device.

There is an Arm Linux build of "Write" right here [1]. I'm curious if it would work on the remarkable as is.

I've never side loaded anything on the remarkable, but... I do own one.. so it's worth dusting it off and trying.

Thanks again for the link to the reHackable repo. Hacker News threads seem to cool off quick, but if I have any luck, I'll report back here.

[1]: http://www.styluslabs.com/faq

The reason the iPad Pro works so great for writing is the 120Hz refresh. I don't think we will see that in an e-ink system anytime soon, but I can always dream.

I have a 2018 model and love the 12.9" screen size for media, note taking, reading, sketching, etc.

That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I don't do anything that needs a desktop class processor.

Artists do love the performance though, people use them for video editing or large image editing with lots of layers.

Edit to add - 12.9" is also helpful for using two apps in splitscreen. Might become less important with Stage Manager, we'll see how I like that.

That's what I don't really understand, though. Even the artists and video editors who use these devices aren't actually leveraging all of the power in the machine. Photo editors and artists are mostly still constrained by single-core performance, and video editors are mostly just leveraging the GPU's video accelerators. The "full power" of the M1 or M2 doesn't even make sense for these pro customers.

That's why I still think an "iPad Max" makes much more sense. Even to professionals, the iPad is ultimately a content consumption device. So, Apple ought to lean into that. Make an iPad you can love with a big screen and punchy OLED panel, while cutting back on the CPU cores to optimize for battery life and thermals. Even if they never put Stage Manager on it and ditched the LIDAR camera, I think these things would sell like hotcakes at the right price.

I think you are underestimating the power of pencil combined with Letter sized screen for people who read research papers, take notes and need entertainment when traveling - potentially entire higher ed students. I just bought an M1 iPad Pro last week and I am impressed with how easy it is to navigate and annotate pdf documents

I don't think I do. I used to own a Surface Pro with their Surface Pen, basically the same experience and I used it for everything from reading manuals to flipping comic book pages. It was great, but none of it's greatness was predicated by "the power" of it's chip. The iPad Pro would be equally as attractive if it used the base-model chip and ditched the LIDAR nonsense, and it would be cheaper.

This just has to be a big use case. There’s a very large community of wealthy people who are extensive business travelers and their core job description is reading and marking up documents on the road.

Think lawyers, finance, basically anyone doing “deals” is in this category. As someone with about 3 million frequent flier miles lying around I’ve seen a whole lot of them in airports.

I have one too. Big screen, thin profile can be used in an airplane seat or wherever, has a cell connection so you don’t need to fuss with wifi to send back comments on something quickly.

It’s really a great application for these things. Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares, when you live on the road and shit depends on you, you just max out all the choices and press the order button.

> Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares

Lower income consumers who would appreciate lower prices.

Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company at this point. The only way for them to grow another 50% from where they are today is through mass market adoption by regular people.

Or maybe these high end devices aren’t meant to drive revenue as much as they are meant to keep power users happy while focusing on other revenue streams for meaningful revenue growth.

What app do you use for this? I'm constantly appalled at how hard this seemingly basic use case is.

Try Foxit pdf - it even lets you crop and apply it to all pages in a pdf.

> That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I don't do anything that needs a desktop class processor.

This right here. I literally only buy them for the screen size, and because Android tablets are... really bad and largely have much worse (for my purposes) software available, even if I could find one in that size.

I never really push the processor or graphics capabilities.

The screen size is incredible for: PDF reading, drawing and art generally, a little video editing maybe, sheet music display and other music purposes, comic book reading, as a portable second screen for a Macbook (it's a very similar size to a 13" Macbook screen), portable SSH terminal, remote desktop, and yeah, watching Netflix or whatever.

But I could easily get by with the brains of a much lower-end model. However, I expect the larger, higher-quality (for faster refresh for drawing and such) screen is a big chunk of their cost to manufacture it, so I'm not sure how much cheaper such a thing would really be.

I truly don't even know what I might do with one that'd really use all that horsepower. Gaming I guess? But I don't like my games vanishing or breaking when I update an OS, so I don't game on iOS very much. Pinball and (now that it's been re-released, finally) Angry Birds. That's about it.

At the most general level, it does run a 2732-by-2048-pixel display at perfectly smooth 120 hz, and that looks great with the Pencil. But I'd give that up to save a couple hundred bucks.

The main bummer with the base iPad display is that it's still using sRGB, while Apple has been using P3 gamut pretty much everywhere else since the iPhone 7. Not sure if I'd downgrade to that one, but I'd be fine with a 12.9" iPad Air.

> That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead.

I bet you can find used ones for much cheaper. I still love my aging 2nd generation 12.9" iPad Pro from 2017. Of course we would all love products even more if they were cheaper, law of demand and all that.

There's a good local wedding photographer here who edits 90% of her commercial work on her iPad Pro now

Surely the full version of Adobe Lightroom on a mac would offer more features than the ipad?

Probably why she only edits 90% of her work on iPad. I think there's a huge percentage of non-developers who are exactly in this boat – can do 90% of their work on an iPad, and enjoy that experience, but keep a traditional computer around for the 10%.

Not every feature is used. Most use a tiny subset of available features.

That makes the iPad fill many many use cases.

I can do about 80% of my work on my iPad

They have Photoshop on the iPad and Adobe says it’s “built with a no compromise in quality and performance”. Which means buggy as any Adobe product but useable. It really can’t get worse than Lightroom on an older intel Mac. An iPad Pro M1 also beat a MBP 16” with an i9 in Geekbench for multi core.

Video editing is also crazy good on an iPad Pro and iPhones.

Well, video editing is crazy fast on iPad and iPhone, that doesn't make it good. Apple goes above-and-beyond building hardware accelerators into their GPU for video content, but the form factor of the iPhone/iPad is considerably worse than editing with a Macbook. I feel the same way about music production on iOS - the hardware is willing, but the software is weak.

Apparently they don’t need all those extra features 90% of the time. The ipad in conjunction with the pencil is a very powerful photo editing tool.

Yes but she said life is nicer somehow using the iPad. Maybe she can do the same on the laptop but she also has a nice garden she likes to do her work in, vs the iMac is my understanding

The miniLED display on the 12.9" is great.

I know that iPads are used in the architecture/construction industry for example. AutoCAD has some products that came out of the PlanGrid acquisition.

> 120hz is nice, but... who the hell is going to need or even appreciate a high-refresh rate on an iPad?

This is a notable differentiator that's easy to see and feel for iPad users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otlDSjAq2hI

> Yeah, I don't really know who Apple is hoping to sell these to. […] The iPad probably won't make sense for most of us until it's discontinued or they add macOS to it, whichever comes first.

Apple knows who they're selling to. Apple's iPad dominates the global tablet market (along with Samsung and Amazon), so there's evidence that it's made sense for its target market for some time now.

> This is a notable differentiator that's easy to see and feel for iPad users.

I agree. We're talking about a device that most people use to watch video though, so they're not going to really be revving it beyond 24hz.

120hz screens are great, but if I didn't play first-person shooters with my friends then I'd have no reason to use mine. Like I said, an OLED panel makes much more sense for the iPad, and arguably the Macbook Pro.

> We're talking about a device that most people use to watch video though, so they're not going to really be revving it beyond 24hz.

Interesting. I don't use my iPad for video much, but I'm going to assume you're right and I'm in the minority. In that case, a nice benefit for cinephiles is that 120 Hz is an integer multiple of 24 Hz, while 60 Hz is not.

60hz is an integer multiple of 24hz when you use LTPO displays, like the ones offered with OLED panels.

iPad Pro has a strong foothold in digital art. Not having to learn how to split brain with a Wacom is a game changer and there aren't many competitors in the space that aren't wayyyyy more expensive.

I have the original (from 2014?) and it is still in use every day. I bought it for sketching but never really used it for that too much. For note taking (with a pen) it has been in use every day. I used to go through stacks of notepads and it was nice to replace them with a digital tool as it makes storage and retrieval much easier. It was an extravagant purchase at the time, but $1100 has started to look relatively after 8(?) years of use.

iPad Pro is amazing for audio, photography, and of course art creation. I am just starting to dip my toes into the audio world and the number and quality of soft synths, sequencers, effects, mixers, etc. is actually breathtaking. The ipad is especially useful when used in conjunction with physical instruments and live performance. A regular laptop isn’t nearly as nice to use in the moment. Suzanne Ciani uses the Animoog Z app on her ipad along with her $20k+ Buchla Modular synthesizer rig during live performances. I have also been enjoying live streams from Pittsburgh Modular. He uses an ipad for sequencing and effects along with the hardware synths.

Having a more powerful ipad allows more and more sophisticated tools to be made for it. Apple brings the capability and developers take advantage.

I have a 2018 iPad pro with a pencil and keyboard, and I love it. It's good for:

* Working on game assets using the Affinity tools (Designer and Photo)

* Second monitor for my Mac when I'm not at my desk

* Chat/videoconference tool, leaving me able to use my computer during virtual meetings

* Travel machine. I can do most of my office-y stuff on it, and use it to ssh into production things. Gitpod lets me do some light coding from there in a pinch, but if I'm planning on a lot of that I usually just carry the Macbook. Because a portable rig with two monitors is damn nice for writing code.

* Reading and annotating PDFs

* Documentation viewing while writing code

* General reading

* Using a square reader to process payments

I suspect that this will likely easily be replaced by a current Air when the time comes, but it's easily useful enough for me to want it. And when you consider that the ASUS portable monitors run in the $300-400 range, and the Wacoms are around $600, I don't feel like I'm severely overpaying.

> but who is Apple selling these to in the long-term?

I've thought this about every iPad model they've made, but obviously I'm wrong every time. I'm sure there are specific professionals who will find this useful, but in my guess is that most iPads are sold for casual use. As to why you would buy the higher-end model, because if you're in the market for an iPad, you probably have disposable income, you might as well get the shiniest one you can.

It feels so close, doesn’t it? My biggest gripe is that iOS doesn’t have proper support for external displays.

iOS 16 fixes that.

Not any more lol

Proper external display support was pulled from the initial release of iPadOS 16 because it was super buggy.

From the press release: > Full external display support for Stage Manager on M1 and M2 iPad models will be available in a software update later this year.

Not in the initial release. They pulled external display support from Stage Manager in later betas to get it working on older models with the A12X and A12Z instead of only the M1 and newer.

External display support is supposed to come back in an update later this year. Presumably that part will still require an M1 or newer processor.

as an ipad mini owner, i selfishly hope they make it work on the a15 as well. I don’t know how unfavorably that chip compares to the a12z, but it seems very fast on the ipad mini.

I don't think apple will implement something like this if it cannibalizes sales of a higher end product with more profit margin. I wouldn't expect a feature like this until there is a ipad sold for the price of a MacBook pro plus an ipad(e.g ipad super pro for 2000$).

Apple doesn't want non-artists to buy iPad Pro instead of MacBook. They want people to buy both.

> Apple doesn't want non-artists to buy iPad Pro instead of MacBook. They want people to buy both.

I see the resident Apple bashers are already warming up their cannons firing a few rounds.

But perhaps we need to take a step back here for a moment....

First you need to consider the security and general platform profile of iOS which is fundamentally different from MacOS. Running MacOS would greatly weaken the iOS security profile of Apple mobile devices, and you have to remember that the devices are not just used by consumers but they are used widely in the corporate world too. iOS loaded with corporate apps is a much more attractive security footprint for corporate IT departments. Personally speaking, I very much like the tightened security footprint of iOS. I wouldn't want to run full-blown MacOS on my phone or tablet, even if I could !

Second, prior to Apple silicon, non-mobile hardware ran on Intel. So Apple were justifiably technically constrained by that fact. However, if you observe Apple today though, you can see MacOS on Apple Silicon allows you to install iPhone/iPad apps simply by downloading them from the App store as you would on an Apple mobile device. I would argue therefore that with time, we may see further blurring of boundaries in both directions.

This gives me an idea for an iPad like device with dual booted MacOS and iOS, and isolated storages for the security concerns. Best of both worlds!

It could even run on the same M2 and other hardware. Just make two partitions on the SSD.

I'm trying to calculate in my head why I (a non-artist) want a tablet with the foldable keyboard thingie instead of a laptop...

I (non-artist) use my iPad + magic keyboard as my primary non-work computer. The battery life is great, it's instant on, has a touch screen, you can play games on it, and it's more portable than a laptop being 11 inches. In general it makes for a great every day device. The only things I don't try to do on my iPad is anything programming related.

I have a friend who bought one to replace her aging laptop with the iPad pro. She wanted it for the touchscreen to navigate and touch up photos (but not via pencil really). But she does also use it often for spreadsheets and email as well, and since you can have multiple apps side by side now, it works for her. She does this at her work environment which doesn't have space for say, dual screens or an office, so it makes sense for her.

I see this comment often. I just find it comical that people really think they know what goes on inside of Apple product meetings. Ipad Pro 12" is as expensive as a Macbook. Perhaps Apple doesn't want people to use full MacOS on an 11" screen because it's not as usable as you think it is...Apple is not out to blindly maximize its profit at all times.

Apple used to sell a Macbook Air 11" and a Macbook 12"

"used to sell" being the key phrase there.

Did they get rid of them because the screens were too small or for other reasons?

Low sales, possibly because the screens were too small...

That could end up being a two-headed monster, with some apps working fine in ‘iPad mode’ and looking awfully out of place in ‘Finder mode’ and other ones looking good in ‘Finder mode’ and bad in ‘iPad mode’.

Unless (almost) all their apps (including third-party ones) would seamlessly switch from a mouse-driven MacOS UI to a pen/finger drive iPad UI, I think most users would be disappointed with that.

Hell, just give access to the Hypervisor framework now that M1/M2 chips natively support virtualization. I would gladly use a macOS or Linux VM on an iPad if it didn't require constant workarounds. UTM is ready it just needs the App Store barrier removed.

As a user experience it's no less jarring than GeForce Now, XBox remote play, Steam Link, Plex, VNC apps, iSH, Blink, etc.

Dear Apple,

Please don't listen to Veliladon. Keep the iPad as it's own thing. In fact, make it more iPad-y and less Mac-y.

If I want a Mac, I'll buy a Mac.

Bought an iPad earlier this year hoping to take some of the responsibilities off of my 2015 MPB, and it's really just a media consumption device.

Hard to admin my home server, program, etc on an iPad, even though it has a much faster processor and way better battery life.

I realize this is a bit of a niche usecase but apple shipping a Terminal.app for iOS/iPadOS would be a game changer.

I want my iPad to become a Finder based full-fat macOS when it's on the Magic Keyboard

And Apple doesn't want you running unapproved software so that's never going to happen unless macOS gets a lockdown mode (only app store apps, no terminal or Unix access, etc).

Too bad that Apple works so hard to strangle 3rd-party software in the cradle.

A device like this would be fantastic with a full desktop environment. Many desktop apps have solid touchscreen support now, ChromeOS has demonstrated that mobile apps can be run seamlessly in a desktop window manager, and you could easily dock it to use with bluetooth mouse/keyboard.

Alas, we've got to put up with a hi-res smartphone OS because that is Apple's vision for this product line.

The iPad Pro is one of the expensive products that I never regret paying 800$ for. Incredible speed, smooth UX, long lasting battery, really doesn't even come close to the previous (Intel-powered) iPads.

Intel based iPads?

With context I think it's pretty clear that they meant tablet.

My thinkpad tablets are thick, hot, and the battery lasts around 3 hours of light use.

There have never been Intel based iPads.

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