Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

> 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.

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