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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

Boggles the mind why people still fall for the iPad Pro as a serious work machine beyond writing meme.

The fact that Final Cut launched on it recently and while its exporting you have to sit there leaving the app open you can't go do something else is the punchline of the decade for the lie that this is a serious machine.

This is before we get into the comical evolution from "You just need the touchscreen" to "Actually physical keys are good for long typing" iPad and a keyboard case, to "oh actually a cursor would be useful to do real work" to full blown iPad + trackpad case awkward laptop form factor.

Actually the more I think about how good the M1 MacBook is it's actually a crime these beautiful processors were locked up in that abysmal form factor and forced to do Facebook and match-3 games instead of real work.

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Yes, iPadOS has deep, lingering deficiencies as an OS for professional use.

But their ads and keynotes are convincing, so I can't blame people falling for it! There's this weird juxtaposition of a terrible productivity machine combined with some mature, amazing and easy to use software in the demos, and Apple makes it look like iPads can be deeply embedded in your workflow and people have fun and laugh as that tiny device with its M1 CPU is a heavy lifter even for 4K and professional audio mixing.

And everything looks good at first sight. Until you reach the final 5% of usage where you either 1) need to interact with other software, 2) other storages like a Mac main storage, NAS, Samba, NFS drive, personal cloud etc, or 3) just somehow move out of (and back into) that sandboxed app for any reason. Then everything falls apart. Yes, even with that Files app.

There are tools and methods to exit the sandboxed app (share sheets omg all the share sheets) but it's just painted with bold letters all over the place that this is not what iPadOS was designed for from the ground up, but it's in fact still just a smartphone OS with a brand change and some special purpose features added on top that you can run on a device with a large display.

When Apple announced the iPadOS brand, I thought "Wow they finally get it" but I don't think they can figure this one out. They've had so many years now and we still have articles like these. I want them to figure it out because a slick system with optional keyboard and mouse sounds great to me.

I'm somewhat convinced that Apple wants to remove the notion of a Unix filesystem (there are files and directories of files/directories and they have owners/permissions/etc) from their users' understanding of how to use a computer. Both out of ideological purity ("what is a computer?") and so that their users can't use a different device that has an entirely different mental model for interaction.

I already see this with juniors/students/kids that grew up using nothing but mobile devices, tablets, and chromebooks with GSuite. They don't know what a file is.

Yes, this is part of the genius strategy that most people don't see. There is an entire generation of people growing up where iPhones and iPads are the computer. Many of them also don't even know that there is a difference between a mobile device and an iPhone. Android is this weird sort of alternative that nobody uses, and Windows is this "PC" thing which they've never used but they hear that some people use for gaming. To these people, the Apple way is the way, and converting them to anything else will be nigh impossible. The current professionals that find iPads insufficient will age out, and the next generation will consider them the standard workstation.

Android is only used by 80% of the rest of the world, but who's counting anyway.

To a subsection of people, "the rest of the world" is a mythical place that doesn't exist.

So is metric

Indeed if are actually going to count, first we need to define which units are relevant.

The Plan9 discussion from a few days ago shows that quite a few people here don't know what a file actually is either.

I mean a file is fundamentally an abstraction, but it's a useful one. What that abstraction means is a bit obscure under the microscope but at a high level the understanding of directories and regular files is pretty straightforward (it's streams, sockets, links, and all the other stuff that pretends to be a file in unixes that presents the problem).

I used to work in architecture, and I think that's where something like an iPad really shines. It was possible to have all the drawing sets on the iPad, and mark them up on the job site to send back to the office for revisions. Being able to annotate them with photographs of the site conditions and redlining as you talk with the foreman is excellent, it makes things a lot more seamless.

Yes, you weren't going to do any actual CAD work and still need a workstation in the office, but as a digital notebook, it's excellent.

I use an iPad Pro mostly for my lectures and for reading and annotating PDFs. After the latest upgrade of iPadOS, I also explored it for more serious work connecting it to a mouse and keyboard. If you're happy with working inside a browser and use it as a terminal, it works just fine, but as soon as you need to manage files or quickly want to edit a document on the device, it becomes pretty painful. I really don't understand why an iPad Pro with Apple silicon - the latest versions sport an M2 - does not get a Pro OS such as Mac OS.

And if you're using it primarily as web browser you can get a Chromebook that will do the job for a fraction of the cost.

This is an excellent & undervalued point: chromeos is basically an easier to use and maintain iPad Pro at half the price, with a performant Linux container

I’m really pleased with my $4K MacBook Pro M2, really amazing device. but after 3-4 years of chromeos before that, I’d trade it for a $1000 i7 Chromebook in a heartbeat, if it wasn’t for darn local LLMs. They’re not even good or fast but I need them professionally.

Will also second this. I’ve used on old linux box with ChromeOS flex as my daily driver doing fullstack web and mobile development for a bit over a year now and it’s easily the best desktop experience I’ve ever had compared to Windows, Linux and MacOS.

Highly underrated indeed.

I bought my iPad 5th gen years ago pretty much for reading PDFs. Sadly, it's barely even usable for that, even after a fresh device reset it's laggy and so slow. I'm not sure if it was always that way; I don't think so. I've stopped upgrading iOS but I think I'm already at 15, if there's a way to go wayyy back that's probably what I want to do, but it's sad that even an iPad can be bogged down so much as to barely run PDF readers. And I always wished mine supported pencil / annotations, but I think I'm one generation behind.

I imagine most employees who get by in cloud docs (Google/Microsoft/etc.) and don't really open apps other than browsers can learn to be comfortable with an iPad, but many people don't want to. I have friends who refuse to even learn to use a trackpad on Macbook because they are so set in their ways.

I’ve never really understood why folks complain that a screwdriver makes a lousy hammer.

> I want them to figure it out

They've figured it out long since, but they're making more profit as it is now.

IMO, I think they figured out what they want.

They don't want iPads to cannibalize their Macs. They then kneecap iPads accordingly.

Interesting, I think it's the opposite. I think they would love iPads to cannabalize or eat entirely Macs. Macs are still fairly open compared to the iPad, and this allows people to use the device as a general purpose computer (instead of an appliance) without Apple as the gatekeeper/protector.

I too was skeptical for a long time, but a couple of days ago, after spotting a second hand iPad (6th gen from 2018) for 90€, I picked it up and I’m actually super impressed. The difference here is expectation vs. money spent and the value received.

Last time I had a tablet, it was the Nexus 7-inch (the screen size of modern phones) and my GF’s surface tablet with 2-4GB of RAM running an entire desktop Windows experience which should be prohibited by law. This along with me seeing some relatives having iPads across the years for web browsing and email, I never felt they’d be useful for much of anything at all.

However, yesterday I managed to mix some music creating a nice melody, edit some of my best photos in Lightroom, annotate PDFs for my thesis’ literature review while copying notes into MS Word, and use it as a second display to my M1 Macbook Air with the sidecar function and it’s been wonderful. The main reason I got it for, however, is the 20€ apple pencil alternative I ordered for my creative drawing and for illustrating my blog.

So far it’s frankly amazing, particularly considering the little money I’ve spent. However, stretching its abilities to coding or anything else seriously productive is definitely asking to have some unnecessary difficulties in life. Especially when you spend so much money for expensive models.

I guess common sense by now would imply that if you want to do serious work, just get a laptop instead.

iPads are great tablets - even the cheapest ones. You can't go wrong with any iPads from the last n-3 generations. But they are tablets. They do tablet-y things great. Other things not so much.

Yeah, I always thought it’s only good for architects with their drawings or for businesses offering product configurators and such to their customers in their physical spaces or museums, etc. But look at that, instead of carrying one more paper notebook in my bag I now have this extra thing in addition to my laptop and it’s pretty good!

This is a good point. I criticized it in another post here in typical Hacker News fashion but just to add some positivity, iPad Pro is great for precisely architects and engineers bringing CAD drawings etc because the guys pack a tablet with a large screen with them to the actual site and can intuitively work with and demo the project with their hands alone. I know this works because we have people at work doing precisely this and they wanted the big displays for ease of use and showing.

But be very cautious if you need to integrate multiple applications and maybe even those not on the iPad (like Visual Studio Code), having to restort to web interfaces or remote computing apps, terminals... Stuff exists for all of this but it's going to get progressively more painful from my experience, the more involved and "not in this single app" your workflow is.

If you stay like 95% of the time on the iPad and a very few apps in a very basic workflow (like bring a CAD drawing to the iPad before you head out), sure that's a good iPad Pro use, I think!

Or marking up PDF plans and reviewing the field plan review comments with the pencil in the field. It’s better than trying to manage 60+ tabloid-size pages and a 30 page document in the field.

It’s a tool that’s really good for some things but not for others. Unfortunately, it’s the software, and not the hardware, that’s holding it back.

>> Boggles the mind why people still fall for the iPad Pro as a serious work machine beyond writing meme.

So it’s not good as a work machine…apart from most jobs. Most jobs are email and documents. If you’re on the move a lot then it’s a good device for those jobs. Jobs which require a lot of computing power, large screens, input devices other than a keyboard and touch screen, are definitely the minority.

I work in a “mostly email and documents” job, and have an iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard case.

Every 6 months or so I try to use my iPad as a MacBook replacement for work for a day. It just, doesn’t work.

Every time I’ve come up against a limitation.

The iOS version of a tool is missing some critical functionality. Moving things between apps is a hassle. Multi-tasking is a hassle. Etc. Etc.

I’ll probably keep occasionally trying, and the iPad Pro is a great tablet. But it’s a hassle even for an “email and documents” worker.

Yeah, I'm basically email/documents/web as well (when not at home) and I've occasionally given the iPad Pro with pencil and external keyboard a shot for working on a short trip. I admit I probably haven't given myself enough time with the various multitasking features to use them reflexively but I've just never been able to really make it work for me. I can in a pinch on a short trip where I'm mostly just doing some browsing and maybe taking some notes but I'm more inclined to just bring a laptop and ditch the iPad entirely. In fact, I don't really use my iPad at home much and I'm not sure I'll replace my current one which is out of or going out of support.

Managing multiple windows, copy/pasting, using shortcuts from muscle memory and things like instant middle mouse click are terrible experiences on any tablet or phone.

Just opening a new tab on a browser is tedious, and if you deal with a lot of intranet tools, this is the very basics of productivity.

> terrible experiences on any tablet or phone

It sometimes feel like an unspoken taboo, but windows tablets are a thing. Or Chromebooks if there is a strong need for mobile app support.

> using shortcuts from muscle memory

This statement is true if you use any machine other than the one you are used to, so this makes little sense. My Windows shortcuts and Linux shortcuts do not match my MacOS shortcuts. I have to use all three OSes at my job.

Well yeah, but consider that Apple has complete control over both systems. I also bought into the ‘iPad for days full of meetings’ idea and found that if I can’t reliably cmd-tab and browse through some files in a non-iCloud folder the whole experience is garbage. The fact that they bolted on some MacOS features afterwards only makes it all the more ludicrous that they didn’t go for parity from the moment they started with those shitty plastic keyboards.

>Just opening a new tab on a browser is tedious

There is a persistent top-level button in Safari's toolbar to open a new tab. I don't know how tedious that is.

Maybe I only speak for myself here, but if my entire job revolved around document markup I'd probably prefer a laptop anyways.

You could technically do "most jobs" on a cheap Android tablet with Chrome and a Bluetooth keyboard if you wanted. You could be a developer who uses Repl.it on your Xbox for all I know. Rationalizing poor software for less complicated jobs seems like a reductive slope to me though.

I'd argue it's a terrible work machine for "most jobs" because it's grossly over priced for them. Dirt cheap laptops and tablets can do email and documents. A tablet starting at $799 that's been touted for it's performance should not have "can do most jobs" as some sort of feather in it's cap. It's entirely justified to expect more from a device with this price and power.

> Boggles the mind why people still fall for the iPad Pro as a serious work machine beyond writing meme.

The form factor is incredible.

I did this a few years ago, used iPad+vps for personal work. As a backend developer mostly, it was not hard.

Then had to switch back as I got into gamedev but miss the form factor of iPad so much. For some reason, it seemed to inspire me at odd hours and places to code.

Now I am back in market for a new machine. Debating hard to give up projects that cannot be done easily on iPad. So that I can get iPad and VPS again. It sounds crazy to limit your curiosity but it’s just incredible machine.

Yeah, Microsoft Surface got this right. Having a touch screen on a laptop is great. I don’t do any coding on my iPad, but I got a knockoff Magic Keyboard and it’s pretty great. The real thing isn’t worth it, since it puts you into laptop price category, and you’re better off buying a low end laptop.

It seems a lot easier to put a touch screen on a laptop. Mine has one, and it's a totally normal laptop.

My work laptop (Dell XPS) has one and I've never used it. It runs Ubuntu and everything is much faster with the mouse (external) than touching the screen. I'm on my MBA, and I've never felt the urge to touch the screen for anything.

And even with the iPad, there is always this friction when context switching from keyboard to pencil. I either use it in tablet mode (touch and pencil) or writing mode (and I always want some pointing device then).

If only I could find a graphic tablet similar to the apple trackpad!

As great as the Apple trackpads are, if you are reading docs, scrolling through stuff, a touch screen is superior. More precise for text selection. Can’t lose the cursor. Better on my wrists. And complex motions are easier. I wish I could CAD with a touch screen gestures.

It’s different environments too. If I am at my desk with external screens, I want a trackball. I don’t want to reach for the screen. But on the couch, or on the go, I wish I had a touch screen Mac laptop.

I’m not sure if it’s a touchscreen by itself make it such a great device.

I think it’s combination of media consumption focus, responsiveness and super light to hold for reading or writing.

When I bought it, I was going to use it just for reading and drawing. But it was with me all the time so I bought keyboard too and started ssh into my virtual machines for light work. Eventually, I was using it for programming more than drawing or reading.

Right. It’s modal. Depending on the kind of task you have on hand, you need different input methods. That’s why you still need a keyboard and touchpad.

The form factor isn’t the problem. The software is. If they’d let it runMacOS it would be great.

I remember seeing an editorial about the rumored release of the iSlate (yes, that's what people thought it'd be called) circa 2010.

It said that if the iPad was a Macbook, all would be well. But if it was a large iPhone, it would set back tablet/mobile computing a decade.

I think it ended up being a little dramatic, but I agree that the iPad being as shackled as its been has been a net negative for computing.

> I think it ended up being a little dramatic, but I agree that the iPad being as shackled as its been has been a net negative for computing.

...well the war on general purpose computing is on, so, unfortunately, the iOS/Android model is "the future". It won't be long until macOS and Windows are just as shackled. Things are definitely moving in that direction right now.

And people have been saying the sky is falling and Apple will force all Mac apps to go through the App Store since 2011.

The moment macOS is shackled any more, I'll move to Linux. And I suspect I'm not alone in this, and that Apple knows.

Mainly DOS/Windows user from ~1992-2000. Mainly Linux 2000-2011. Mac since.

> The moment macOS is shackled any more

I hadn't really noticed it being "shackled" at all. What do you mean?

If you don’t have an Apple developer account and you give a program you wrote to someone else, their computer will refuse to open it unless they go into System Preferences and whitelist the program.

This is intentionally misleading. Running any unsigned package requires the end user to open the program through system preferences for the first time, as a “did you really mean to run this potentially pwning software”. It’s a good security practice, and less intrusive than windows UAC by far.

With Windows UAC, when you run a program it opens a pop-up saying "do you want to run this program" and you can click "yes" to continue. With a Mac, if you run an unsigned program it opens a pop-up saying "program cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified" and your options are "Move to Trash" or "Cancel". It doesn't mention anything about letting you open the program anyway. This means that if you want to develop software targeted at anyone who doesn't know to go to the security section in System Preferences when they're not prompted to do so, you have to pony up $100 for a developer license. A lot of open-source projects don't offer Mac builds for this reason, and you have to build from source instead.

I keep reading that every time Microsoft pushes something some folks don't like, yet Year of Linux Desktop has become a meme.

macOS has no exclusive apps that I use, while most of the games I‘m interested in and lots of exotic inhouse tools only work on Windows.

This was what I swore to myself when Mojave released. I left during the Catalina beta.

Except most people don't need a full-feature general purpose computer.

"I want to code on a tablet" is a pretty niche market.

The M1+ iPad Pros are pretty good digital creation devices. Lots of photographers use them in their workflows now. Doing a quick (but still high quality) edit at an event, so the customer has something to share immediately is a huge value add.

I am used to being able to write code on my 'computer'. That's my standard definition of 'computer' -- or maybe let's call it 'personal computer'. I can't write code on my microwave for my microwave; I can't write code on my TV for my TV; and I can't write code for my iPad on my iPad -- this means all these devices are computer-powered 'devices'. They are NOT 'personal computers'.

At least, this is how I see it. And while I use my iPP all the time, with kbd & pencil, I would like to bang out a chunk of Python once in a while or write some lisp --- there are 'ways' to do this, they're just clunky.

I'd like to write apps for the iPP, too. But I don't have the required 'development system' (a Mac), and the Swift environment that was recently announced seems more like a playground than a dev environment.

As for moving files around -- I find using Google Drive is the easiest cross-platform way to do this; but yes, it's mainly into the iPP, except for pictures & videos.

this means all these devices are computer-powered 'devices'

Exactly. My iPP is a "personal media consumption device" - anything beyond that is a bonus.

Broadly agree, but:

> This is before we get into the comical evolution from "You just need the touchscreen" to "Actually physical keys are good for long typing" iPad and a keyboard case, to "oh actually a cursor would be useful to do real work" to full blown iPad + trackpad case awkward laptop form factor.

I don't find it surprising; the windows tablets before the iPad suffered from so much software presuming there was a keyboard and a mouse pointer that they were bad user experiences the moment you tried to do without.

The iPad… I remember some of the rumour mills putting out an idea of what it would look like in advance, where it was straight up running macOS X. If it had done that, it would've sucked for all the same reasons: fat fingers on UI that presumed the fine control of a mouse pointer, or that presumed context menus were easy with a right click (or command + left click; I'm not sure how rapidly or when single-button mice disappeared from the Apple world).

It still feels like it has some problems with apps that assume iPhones are the only thing that matters.

I think Apple might still be gearing towards adding macOS in the iPad only because the macOS interface has been adding padding, in almost all recent releases, while screens have remained the same size. I don't see any other reason for added padding around controls apart from a touch screen future.

Designers changing stuff to have something to do?

The system preferences redesign is the first thing that has bugged me (I moved to Mac around 2019). There was no need at all and because they use Catalyst, the icons, and the text are tiny.

Might be the first step into evaluating this course of action. Who knows?

People are also using the iPad for running audio programs. There’s a ton, and they work together by routing audio from one app to another (so you don’t need a VST / AU host). Then there’s all the people running ProCreate or something similar. The horsepower is getting used.

There are definitely ways to leverage the horsepower natively. Having toured with musicians pretty recently though, I'd be lying if I said I saw a single person using an iPad for performance purposes. Everyone uses a laptop, and I don't think Logic Pro on iPad would have changed much. People want Ableton Live and Omnisphere with deep audio hardware support in the drivers and a proper file manager. The iPad makes a valiant attempt at supporting class-compliant MIDI and audio hardware, but it's enormously outclassed in capability by Mac and Windows.

It feels like even if Apple's DAW utopia came to pass, the iPad would still be an imperfect and less powerful option compared to a similarly specced Mac.

I'm not exactly at the highest levels of industry. I generally agree with you- I much prefer hardware or a laptop.

However, as a musician, I wouldn't perform with one, but I use forescore literally every day.

As an sound tech, I've mixed a while lot of shows on glass both as a monitor engineer and FOH for smaller stuff. My iPad is a great tool for that work. They are pretty ubiquitous amound sound techs, at least at the levels I work at.

I’m not surprised that you haven’t seen iPads on tour, but I think it’s coming. The software ecosystem is here now.

If you music, have an iPad, and can spare the cost of a couple restaurant dinners, I recommend picking up the USB adapter and an app like AUM ($22). There are a ton of workhorse tools available like BIAS FX 2, and a ton of apps which are just fun, like Gauss Field Looper ($7). The price/performance of this kind of setup is just out of this world. I don’t think it’s replacing the DAW any time soon, despite the arrival of Logic/Cubasis/Reason/etc, but it’s giving pedalboards a run for their money.

It's all CoreAudio/CoreMIDI under the hood, in both iPadOS and MacOS. I don't think MacOS does anything "deeper" but there is some 3rd party stuff like PT HDX/UAD, etc.

The limiting factor is the performance software (Mainstage and Live) aren't on iPadOS, yet. Live has some bigger lifting to do to get there.

Yep. There's a lot of guitar player youtubers who use iPads for amp modeling and effects. Seems to work pretty well.

I think there's a sentiment that "it can't do coding therefore it has zero use" in this thread.

I'm a software engineer and I daily drive a 12.9in iPad pro at home...because I don't code at home (and have a work M1 for that). I originally bought the 12.9 so I could read sheet and use it as an all in one piano learning companion.

It was great for that! I did give up on Piano unfortunately and now i mainly use it as a very expensive content consumption device - which actually is still great vs lugging a 15in "work" laptop when I travel just so I can watch netflix.

It is similar to the one that only UNIX folks are developers.

Also - people assume everyone on here is a developer of some sort.

> This is before we get into the comical evolution from "You just need the touchscreen" to "Actually physical keys are good for long typing" iPad and a keyboard case

This part is a straw man. When the iPad was first introduced in 2010, there was an iPad stand, keyboard contraption that SJ showed off. The iPad has always supported Bluetooth keyboards.

They market it certainly as PRO, with a hefty pricetag included.

You seem to just acknowledge the author's point that Apple's marketing is false.

Yet you shame if him for not knowing it. Seems like this article is useful for people still thinking of this.

> how good the M1 MacBook is

The primary deficiency of the macbook, and about 95% of all modern laptops, is the keyboard. Primarily the height reduction of the up/down arrows in the arrow key cluster. Nothing is more maddening for code navigation than these terrible, terrible keyboards. Same with the Esc key on many laptop keyboards, in which they are either size-reduced or eliminated entirely.

(yes, I know I'm "supposed" to use hjkl, but jk has never mapped to up/down in my brain, despite trying)

There are some "gaming" laptops that do the keyboard somewhat correctly, but driver support for all the RGB crap is effectively nonexistent in linux. Not to mention most of them are only FHD displays.

The market has largely failed to address the needs of developers.

My personal solution has been constructing my own "laptop" inside a Pelican case with a mini-itx motherboard, a 4k oled panel, a Drop Ctrl keyboard, two 10Ah 24v lithium-ion battery packs, an adjustable DC buck converter (with a little extra output capacitance added), and a couple of brushless fans.

> The market has largely failed to address the needs of developers

I'm a developer, and small arrow keys are perfectly usable to me.

> (yes, I know I'm "supposed" to use hjkl, but jk has never mapped to up/down in my brain, despite trying)

I felt this way for a while, until I turned off / remapped my up/down arrows, and forced myself to use hjkl. You pick it up pretty quick after that.

Personal preference, small arrow keys don’t bother me at all. Regardless, 90% of the time I’m working on my laptop it’s plugged in at a desk where I can use whatever keyboard I want.

> Boggles the mind why people still fall for the iPad Pro as a serious work machine beyond writing meme

Depends on your definition of “serious work”. I don’t write much code anymore, but I can definitely do my entire job using my iPad Pro. I have pretty much done my job for the last couple weeks while managing a family medical situation with multiple back and forth to hospital each day using my iPad. Built in cellular, a small and very light form factor even with the Logitech folio touch case I added, which is completely comfortable to work on…and I can pull it from my sling bag and be up and running in about 3 seconds.

Frankly if I needed access to my main rig back on my desk, Parallels Access is more than sufficient to accomplish that need, but I rarely finding myself needing to use it.

In my country there are a lot of people doing a ton of work with photos and video on iPhones. They are the generation who almost skipped the desktop. I think the M1 iPad is for these people, not us legacy desktop users. That said, why can't we simply have macOS on iPad right?

> Boggles the mind why people still fall for the iPad Pro as a serious work machine beyond writing meme.

I wouldn't know of course, but if I had to guess it'd say it's because of influencers and trends/fashion.

iPad pros are amazing digital art mediums (Procreate as a basic example you have heard of), assuming you consider art to be real work which I do.

I don’t use Final Cut so not sure if it supports split screen, but even apps that require full screen can be multitasked with Stage Manager now. So you can go do something else. I don’t love Stage Manager, but I use it from time to time for this exact purpose — do something else while a full screen app is also running.

Final Cut does not support split screen multitasking or resizing. and you can't switch away from it while it's exporting to answer a slack message or browse the web, it will just cancel the export.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/24/final-cut-for-ipad-limitation...

Interesting, the full screen apps I use just keep going when switching window in Stage Manager, whereas some tasks are normally suspended when switching without Stage Manager. What about slide over? Link doesn't mention it, and Slack can be easily used in a slide over window.

I bought an 11" M1 Pro when they were released. But not for coding. It was a splurge and I justified it as "home laptop replacement" with a heavy side of "M1 should mean it'll be supported for a LONG time." Similar theory as maxing the RAM on a new MacBook, etc.

Now that the Air has that same hardware, my wife bought that instead of a Pro, and that's what I'd recommend to most people. The extra camera features are pretty worthless IMO (I have an iPhone Pro and a mirrorless for photography).

I have the Magic Keyboard. It wasn't cheap, but it's really good. My wife didn't bother, but she also has an M1 MacBook Air for laptop stuff.

Touchscreen = consumption. Physical keyboard = production.

My stereotypical, effective perspective of digital productivity.

right now I'm on a touchscreen device fighting that sorry excuse for a keyboard to type; I'm in consumption mode. Not fooling myself.

Touchscreen = navigation and manipulation

It depends on what you consider a serious work machine. Half the time, I couldn't do my job on it because I need Xcode and Android Studio, neither of which run on it (yet?). But days where I'm in meetings or just writing docs, I could (and have) gotten by on just my iPad. My barber runs their business on an iPad, using a native app to handle scheduling and payment combined with a Square reader. Musicians can carry their entire musical portfolio on one, and get paid for their work after. Realtors can do nearly all of their daily work on one since it's largely web-based these days. Our use cases aren't the only ones.

> Actually the more I think about how good the M1 MacBook is it's actually a crime these beautiful processors were locked up in that abysmal form factor and forced to do Facebook and match-3 games instead of real work.

I feel the same, but for Apple's UI design. The fact that the entire silicon engineering team's achievements are being wiped out by Apple's UI fashionistas is a shame. These people will find a way to make it slow again. The entire system would feel 10x faster if all animation times were cutdown by half (from 150ms to 75ms for example).

Boggles the mind why people still don't see how an iPad Pro is a GREAT tool for things far beyond writing.

I shifted my photography workflow to the iPad, and it's been an unalloyed success, for example. I no longer travel with a laptop unless it's explicitly a work trip.

Further, the iPad is pretty GREAT at remote access for Linux or Windows hosts. If you need to do remote admin work, and you want to travel light, it's a better choice than lugging your Dell.

Reflexive hostility to iOS is an article of faith among some folks at places like HN, but it's just not justified.

> iPad Pro is a GREAT tool for things far beyond writing. [...] Further, the iPad is pretty GREAT at remote access for Linux or Windows hosts.

I try and I try and I try because lots of tasks can be done and I want to like it. But I run into this certain problem that I also get with a laptop. I’m going along fine getting shit done then hit a stretch of work with a cognitive load/interaction balance where I start thinking “this would be easier with a mouse.” On a laptop I can grab an external mouse and in either case if that kind of workload keeps going I start thinking “why am I hunched over like this?”

I think I'm just a sucker for the marketing. This thin, lightweight, extremely portable, cute little rectangle can be my interface with professional life. I can do everything on the go and be free in life. I don't have to be a nerd that likes, or just be some rube stuck with being tethered to eyesore equipment in one physical location. ...but it's not working. My ergonomic keyboard, eye-level 27 inch screen and physical mouse are productivity.

And there's a nagging fear at the back of my mind that statements about "you can make it work and be more productive" are true when someone tells me to put time into learning vim and a tiling window manager controlled entirely by keyboard shortcuts, but false when said about finding a mobile workflow.

I mean, if you're going to do things like remote access with Windows, you'll need to either get a pencil or get a trackpad case. It definitely would be painful with JUST the device, but I don't see this as a problem.

I definitely AM more comfortable with a traditional OS -- I mean, I've been using computers since the 80s -- and prefer MacOS by a wide margin. Working in iOS is different, so there definitely IS a cognitive load there. But in terms of portability and usability on the go, a beefy iPad has SO MUCH going for it that I'm willing to adapt.

I definitely also hear you about how a certain set of people are entirely supportive of the argument "you just have to get used to it; you can be productive" if the subject is vim or emacs, and then 100% reverse themselves when the subject is an iPad. Weird, right?

Every time I tried to import/copy large photo sets (hundreds of gigs), the tablet would end up being useless for a long time and often even crashing. Which is ridiculous, I just wanted to copy the files. This is with a first gen iPad Pro.

I literally got it for copying photogrammetry data sets, so it was useless for the one basic task that I got it for. :(

Weird. I copy cardfulls of photos into Lightroom on the regular when I'm traveling, and it's fine. You DO have to leave LR running to do it, but I mostly do this overnight anyway.

Uh, that’s definitely not reasonable behavior IMO. It should take 10-15 minutes to copy, max, and be able to do it in the background while I’m doing other things. The hardware is more than capable.

How so? An iPad pro plus keyboard is heavier, bulkier and much more expensive than a macbook air. That is the comparison, not "lugging your dell".

Even if what you said was true -- that an iPad + keyboard is heavier and more expensive -- an Air is less flexible, has only one usable form factor, and has drastically less battery life than the iPad solution.

Are you saying apple is lying? Because they publish both weight and battery life numbers. Hint: "less" means the number is smaller.

I'm saying you're arguing in bad faith, and are thus probably not worth engaging with further.

Just to recap: your "even if" was very rude. I called you out on it. Instead of apologizing, you now insult me.

The iPad (pro in particular) is an incredible platform for music production and lots of other "pro" tasks. People mostly use them in conjunction with other machines.

I want an iPad for drawing to make sticker files to send to my Cricut. While it's apparently the best pen/device for drawing, the fact that they are priced $500+ is has been a blocking point for me so far. I'm not sure why people think they can export video from an editor, that doesn't sound like a pleasant experience.

I was expecting an ipad as a working power house many years ago but that changed when m1 MBA come out.

It seemed apple doesn't intend to improve ipad to be on par with Mac os. Arm MBA is the one that I'm looking for without the touchscreen. That's good enough for me.

This still holds true today. Apple doesn't care about the ipados for professionals.

Because not everyone is a coder, and there are lots of professional work scenarios where a tablet does perfectly fine.

The way files are managed on iPadOS is terrible for 90% of ‘work’ except web browsing or email. It’s really awkward and slow, and IMO essentially unusable.

And yet photographers are able to use various Adobe (or similar) products to do real-time edits/sharing of their work. Most people don't need 100% control over the file-system. As long as the particular type of file they manipulate is available in the app they want to use, an iPad works pretty well.

If they have a single app/app suite that does everything, then sure that's fine (as long as it isn't things like copying a lot of data off an SD card or whatever) - the OS doesn't get involved much.

That isn't a common use case unless someone is paying a ton of money for a single, specialized piece of software that does everything they want, and the iPad only is used for that one thing. Which is a very limited subset of 'work'.

Many professionals beg otherwise, and are perfectly fine with documents as central concept of work unit, similar to Xerox Workstations.

That's not how the iPadOS treats files. Things are 'owned' by a single App, which makes moving data around or working on a common thing a real PITA except in very specific cases (and even then, it is often heavily controlled).

It's a 'App as a central work unit' type workflow, which is fine as long as you don't use more than a single piece of software/app to work on something.

I know professional photographers that use them for photo editing, but not as their main machine. It allows for a more casual way to work when that is desired.

It also works well for showing photos to clients. Clearly it’s valuable to at least some professionals.

It's really nice as an extension of a notebook (doing math problems, drawings, practicing on keyboard quickly, etc.).

I wouldn't replace it as a serious work machine, but it doesn't need to be really. Over time it will get closer and closer.

I will say however that a plain iPad connected to a macbook in side car mode (second display) makes for a great portable dual screen work setup

You don't have to sit there and wait! You can go grab a coffee or have a smoke!

Or buy another one so you can work on one and wait for the other. Or you could spend that time shopping for an even better device, even maybe from another manufacturer.

No I like the idea of multiple ipads to multitask. It's like a sort microservice for doing computer stuff and you get the security benefits of airgapped processes!

you can split the app screen to allow it to work if I recall correctly

Spot on

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