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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

I made the mistake of only carrying an iPad during my most recent holidays. What a useless piece of junk this is.

iPads work well enough at home to watch movies or play a couple of games, but trying to do any kind of serious work on them, either editing photos, writing something, sending files, even trying to use a sequencer is an exercise in frustration.

We are sooo lucky there (still) exist alternative computing solutions other than these things made by a company obsessed with control and extracting the maximum possible value out of every movement of their users.

Apple is the evilest of evils. It must be fought with great determination if we are concerned with freedom.

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> Apple is the evilest of evils. It must be fought with great determination if we are concerned with freedom.

Continuing using Apple products while periodically expressing your frustration on Reddit/HN is not a good way to "fight" Apple. Consider using PC with Linux or something.

Yes, hence "mistake". (Also I only buy products second hand.)

If you want an alternative then you will need to pay for it.

Apple makes money because people pay for their products.

Maybe consider the Framework laptop. I don't have it, but that's what I'd consider if I wanted off Apple's crazy ride.

> Also I only buy products second hand

I would assume that popularity of second had Apple products increases their resale value and indirectly benefits Apple since people consider their products to be a better investment and buy more of them.

You can code on it, design, edit photos, write books, sketch, edit videos... and a lot more with ease. For 3 years, I used only an iPad for work. Can you expand on your problems? Or was that a "it works differently on my beloved OS" kind of thing?

> You can code on it

In castrated terminal that is walking on the edge of what is "permitted" by overlords.

Or are you talking about open thin IDE that connects to a remote machine in a browser?

https://vscode.dev/

So the second one.

You can’t compile on it. You can’t run software in the background (for example a terminal, where you don’t have to bring the app to the foreground every few minutes). You can’t install software on it that Apple doesn’t want you to (regardless of whether or not they’re malicious). And the software you can run is more likely than not a subscription, because the only place you can buy it is the App Store, which pushes the subscription model unto users and devs.

You also can't run servers which writes off huge parts of web development.

You can't install a random program. You need to go through the appstore for everything. There is no shared filesystem. Trying to export an image from a photo editing app takes a couple of seconds just to build the list of possible target apps. Everything is not only gratuitously complex, but reminds you you're not in control. You're a guest in Apple's world, instead of Apple being there to serve you.

Can you expand on how you code on an iPad? (the IDE, the languages and the kind of compilation you do (or lack of))

iPads aren't setup for "serious work" out of the box. There's a whole community who have developed workarounds and apps for serious work on it, but it prioritizes being "grandma proof" over a serious work machine from the get go.

My Grandma has an iPad. Every time I visit we end up sitting down for hours reviewing how to do things in various apps and switch between them. The system constantly hide navigation control, moves things around in response to scrolling, and requires precise swipes or taps on flat or near-invisible controls to reveal information or get around. Watching her try to use iPadOS is always useful in keeping myself grounded in terms of UI design. Suffice to say that the thing is not at all Grandma-proof.

And sure, at least there aren't tens of sketchy toolbars doing god-knows-what each time she opens Safari, but there are tens of sketchy-looking games and apps installed on the 4th home screen that she doesn't want or use, and opening any immediately throws up full-screen autoplaying ads with audio before letting her into some cheap sudoku implementation. I don't want to hear this "walled garden keeps you safe" nonsense; there are plenty of scams on the App Store.

> but it prioritizes being "grandma proof" over a serious work machine from the get go

Which is kind of absurd considering they sell a device called "iPad Pro" which costs as much as their entry-level laptops, which are—by and large—enormously more capable, despite sharing the same internals.

I appreciate the iPad as a computer for people who aren't interested in computers (my mum has been happily iPad-only for years now), and I recognise that I have a degree of saltiness because I'm a software developer and the "Pro" in "iPad Pro" seems far more geared to artists and other creative professions, but it's a terrible shame there's no way to take the training wheels off what is otherwise a fantastic ultraportable computer.

My MacBook Pro is a great computer that I like a lot, but the only reason I even need it is because my iPad is incapable of doing anything I need for development, and the ~15% of dev I do away from my desk is still important to me. If I could do some casual noodling or prototyping work on my iPad with a keyboard, I could have just bought a desktop Mac instead.

is someone forcing you to buy apple products?

Lack of alternatives.

Try Librem 11.

What requirements do you have that are only served by apple?

It weird so many young people do most of their work on iPhone, including producing videos, photos, and text. Yet when it comes to iPads most people don't want to touch it for work.

For a lot of use cases, iPads are worse at those things. For video and photos, the iPhone camera is night and day better. It's also easier to hold for taking those photos, while also being portable (so you don't have to carry an iPad around).

For a generation that has been texting on touchscreen for years, the muscle memory for typing on a phone is pretty well defined. In my experience, typing on a tablet requires different muscle memory and is slower.

If you add a keyboard and stylus, the iPad could be more useful than a phone. But at that point, you're spending a lot of money to improve a device that still has all of the limitations of iOS.

I remember everyone always was fascinated by all the kids in Japan that had a fancy flip phone but not a computer. Seems like Japan was simply 20 years ahead of everyone, as usual.

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