Not an iPad Pro Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn't Get the Basics Right
macstories.net
macstories.net
I think of iPhones as personal devices, where each person may have their own. But iPads are more likely to be shared for personal use in families. The fact that each person using it cannot have their own user profiles, app data, etc., is a huge drawback. Apple has supported this for a long time (though probably not in the best way) for education, but it’s not available to others. Even tvOS supports switching between user profiles quickly.
Apple enforcing the idea that iPad (with iPadOS) should also be a personal device — one device per person — makes the user experience quite poor.
Apple has an API so that third party apps can tie profiles to appletv user ids (iCloud ids) but I haven’t seen a single 3P app that uses it. Apple could make it mandatory at some point I suppose but the UX for connecting the two in each app would likely be tedious.
Also there is no password protection with changing user ids so kids can accidentally screw up your watch history / preferences. And without any passwords you don’t want to connect photos or anything like that to the tv.
It’s pretty much a botch, just like the cases described in this article.
It's laughably bad, since Photos doesn't even support more than one iCloud photo library per TV, so switching just makes the Photos app not work.
From what i see, this is their position and it looks like, so far, it has worked out for them quite well. I'd love to hear your take on it as it seems you have a different than mine.
Funny thing is that even Steve Jobs said as much in an interview: basically, that a computing platform was dead without market share and they made a mistake with the Mac, making it too inaccessible for too many people. But I guess history and mistakes are just a cycle.
It would be very good for everyone if they fell from grace and start "losing" profit so they can't start working on stuff, once again.
I don't disagree with you in general and it is what I recommend to others with the same issue... but the issue is completely unnecessary since (however many generations ago iPad hardware stopped struggling).
It’s the lightest laptop ever made I could find at the time and a similar form factor and weight to an iPad with keyboard.
If Apple ever released a 12” MacBook again with Apple silicon I’d go pick one up immediately, and likely use it more than my MacBook Pro.
Having a super light full desktop experience without the time required to tap extra gestures was much better.
iPad also was a pretend computer for a long time until it got mouse support, then specifically built in to the keyboard.
That was a very important step forward. Now, it is a pretend computer with mouse support.
Apple's resistance to a mouse continued with the resistance to having a mouse pointer.
A Surface Pro running MacOS would be the real game changer.
Being touch-first is much more inefficient than using a mouse and keyboard.
The pageantry of taps and swipes needed add up to a lot of time, and knowing the difference, it can be difficult to justify the effort. Maybe I'm missing a detail.
Apple is excellent at introducing technology to beginners (just use your finger), it doesn't mean it's the most productive or effective.
He is non-technical and it took some bullying to get him to max out the ram and cpu but he never imagined an 11" wouldn't be availbale in the future and assumed he'd upgrade.
The 11" was excellent. If there was a newer version, the bezels would be much smaller, and maybe a different kind of 12" could fit in it.
There is not much that is interesting after so many new devices, but an 11" or 12" would be something I'd want quickly enough to line up for it.
> Even tvOS supports switching between user profiles quickly.
I wonder if somebody had to justify that in an internal meeting at some point? "Most TVs have multiple HDMI ports, wouldn't it be only fair to expect families to buy one Apple TV per–"...
As an occasional Chromecast (with Google TV) (4K) (running Android TV) user, I think Google wins this round of botched branding.
Edit: Of course it makes sense to clarify the app's name as "Apple TV", similarly to "Apple Podcasts" or "Apple Calendar", but that doesn't mean that's its official name.
Sure, Apple could have named it something memorable and unambigous like "CouchPotato" or "Bingetime" or whatnot, but that sounds more like early 2000s Apple from a branding point of view.
I'm not really sure what you're on about, but all of the names you boldly claimed are not named what you say they are named. Right there on the app is the apple logo in front of the letters TV, aka AppleTV. Launching that app in the left hand menu, it clearly states Apple TV+ as an option. The logo on the device is the same as the logo on the app. So if you're stipulating it is read as Apple TV for the device, why would it also not be read the same way for the app using the exact same logo?
To be fair, they're blatantly wrong about the Google branding. They went ahead and did the Apple thing, it's all Google TV as far as consumer branding.
Similarly Chrome is their web browser so why call the physical device Chromecast? It kind of works because on of its less popular features also uses Chrome so that reinforces the name for anyone who uses it this way, but that’s a real stretch now days.
> Similarly Chrome is their web browser so why call the physical device Chromecast?
I suppose it originally made sense, given that the physical Chromecast device only worked with Google Chrome, and in its early days even was used for tab mirroring (until most video sites started integrating the protocol natively). Wanting to benefit from the (at the time quite positive) brand perception of "Google Chrome" probably plays an even bigger part.
But at this point it seems like a weird historical leftover.
Cool, where do I buy a "Google TV" then?
It's still called "Chromecast with Google TV" as of today: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv
Google TV is an app/portal/service (with somewhat ill-defined boundaries, but I generally like it on my Chromecast, as it's able to pull in recommendations from basically all available sources, unlike Apple TV, which seems to have some feud with at least Netflix); the Chromecast with Google TV is the physical device I can plug into my TV to make it display Google TV.
The streaming protocol is currently called "Google Cast", as far as I can tell.
> So if you're stipulating it is read as Apple TV for the device, why would it also not be read the same way for the app using the exact same logo?
The logo of WhatsApp is a chat bubble containing a phone handset, yet it's not called "Chat bubble containing a phone handset WhatsApp".
Of course it can make sense to call the app "Apple TV", to disambiguate it from e.g. the Netflix app on an iPhone. I'm just saying that I don't think that that is its official name, and I also don't think this is very confusing in practice.
Netflix is also both an app and a company! Just say "Apple TV app" or "Apple TV device" if you want to disambiguate them?
> Launching that app in the left hand menu, it clearly states Apple TV+ as an option.
I never claimed that there was no service called "Apple TV+".
"I'm not aware of any service called that."
> Launching that app in the left hand menu, it clearly states Apple TV+ as an option.
You are now aware. That's all I was doing. I never said you never said blah blah blah
I was referring to Apple TV, not Apple TV+, specifically in response to:
> I think it’s a big unaddressed problem for Apple that they have an Apple TV device, an Apple TV app, an Apple TV service, and an Apple TV Plus service.
There's at least one too many "Apple TV x"s in that list, is my point. Apple TV is a device; (Apple) TV is also an app. The streaming service is called Apple TV+.
> Launching that app in the left hand menu, it clearly states Apple TV+ as an option. [...] You are now aware. That's all I was doing. I never said you never said blah blah blah
What? I've been using Apple TV+ for years. Of course they're promoting their own streaming content service in their own app!
There are TVs that have the Apple TV app on the TV.
Apple TV video service is definitely called Apple TV.
Apple's goal is to confuse people into staying in their garden. The "TV" app is only available on iOS devices.
There used to be iTunes, where you could buy and rent movies. Then Apple split that app into its components "Music" (including purchased music as well as the subscription service called Apple Music), "TV" (including movie rentals, purchases, and the subscription service "Apple TV+") and "Podcasts".
Since these three things are quite generically named, of course it makes sense to practically refer to them as "Apple Podcasts" etc., and Apple's marketing department should have seen that need coming, but in-ecosystem, it does align somewhat nicely with other apps called Calendar, Mail etc, and when it's not clear from context, just add "Apple" in front (and maybe "app" at the end), and everybody will know what you're talking about.
And why would they need to trademark it?
Having a piece of hardware called an Apple TV, with a TV app, and a "premium" plus service doesn't strike me as a problem. Except perhaps that the Apple TV isn't a TV, which is kind of funny, but I can't think of a better product name and it's not something of real concern to me.
The names we give things help to differentiate what we think about them.
Apple using "TV" all over the place is like plastering their apps with 3.5" floppy or 120mm optical disks, or prepending anything user-specific with "My ".
So if there's a thing that can show me a bunch of TV serials and movies, why not call that TV?
I suppose you could be nitpicky and say "TV means linear broadcast or cable TV, not VOD"; it should be called (Apple) VCR" – but now we're really talking outdated technologies :)
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2024-q2/FY24_Q2_Consol...
Genuinely curious, how does one come to the necessary conclusions that then lead to making statements like this?
What supports the notion that Apple is struggling to be profitable?
https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
So basically only schools or businesses can use the feature. It’s really galling that the feature is already implemented but they won’t give it to us because of an obvious attempt at a money grab.
Would some people want it, sure, but features aren’t free to add or maintain.
iPhone mini showed how much vocal Internet commenters (don’t) represent the actual user base. Commenters said they wanted a smaller iPhone. Then it sold poorly. And I say this as I write this on an iPhone 13 mini.
I suspect the multi-user iOS, right along with the people complaining that iOS is underpowered generally, is the same phenomenon at work.
The argument is that is is free because the feature already exists and is being maintained. You just aren't allowed to have it.
Edit: It seems people are offended. I didn't mean to. Let me rephrase: Apple's fiduciary responsibility is to make money for its shareholders. If you are not in favor of this, pick different products (slowly migrating back to Linux, in my case.)
1. Fiduciary duty has a specific legal meaning that is not really applicable here.
2. Corporations are not responsible solely to their shareholders.
If you are not in favor of this, pick different products. You must learn to kneel to the overlords.
There are non-tablet alternatives. Get a laptop. Get a Chromebook. Both support multiple users. Both can be cheaper than an iPad.
Indeed maybe the Android tablets “suck” because Google and those manufacturers are busy adding things people don’t want, like, ahem, multi-user support, while maybe Apple products are better because they are focused and don’t have the kitchen sink.
Android tablets absolutely don't suck if you put as much money in them as you would in an Apple one. It is just that people have been convinced by marketing and by people like you (believers) that they suck at any price and that if you have to put as much money, you better get an Apple one anyway, which is just plain wrong.
You seem to conveniently forget that the reason iPad got so much traction is because they launched at a price that was very competitive. It was state-of-the-art technology and even if you wanted to put more money there wasn't much better to be had.
Now you are somewhat right telling people to not buy an iPad, but they also have the right to complain about the state of things, particularly since switching OS is an expensive (have to rebuy all the software, possibility content held captive in the "Store") and time consuming (need to figure out how to transfer everything and learn new stuff). This is especially true since Apple has made this part very difficult for obvious reasons. If you relied on their messaging platform there is just no other way than to export and archive, losing all continuity and if you relied on their office suite there is no other way than to export and recreate any files in a competitor software. This problem exists in other parts of this industry but it's rarely as bad as with Apple... And there is the fact that since their hardware doesn't support any other OS, telling people to just change hardware that is still in good shape, that should be more than sufficient for their need is just stupid peak consumerism. "It's fine, you just need to re-buy all the things, and then it works "
So, people complain against their disgusting behavior and ask for better solutions for the money they spent, as they should. You don't have more legitimacy telling people to just chose another vendor no matter how you feel...
No, but Apple already built this feature and maintain it. So why only restrict it to large organisations?
It's my low-end test device, but tops out at iOS15, so it's almost useless.
The button works every time, unlike Face ID which is sometimes hit / miss for me.
Camera is quite good. Not the latest / greatest but honestly, who cares? Most people believe they are artists that are shooting the next masterpiece, yet most pictures are a)never seen ever again or b) a poor attempt of a picture already taken 20 million times - you are not that special as Apple makes us believe.
Pocketable, decent battery, does not force me to grip it forcing my finger joints. Screen is small, yes, but an upside to remember to put my phone in my pocket more and live the world more. I have a laptop and a tablet for longer sessions.
I don't remember there being any features, ever, which the mini was missing and the base model iPhone had. Might have missed it, but I'm going to need to see a link.
"shitty components and artificially disabled hardware" is one way to look at it. I think "significantly smaller battery and scaled accordingly" is more accurate, personally.
I'm an undemanding phone user. I take pictures, catch rides, use the map, take calls, listen to stuff. I don't hang out on my phone. So I want a phone that's as small as it reasonably can be, it fits more places and I notice it less.
However, I also want the battery to last a full day. The only way I'm going to get that is if the phone is somewhat less powerful than a phone running the same OS and apps with a rather larger battery. This is a tradeoff I am comfortable with, and was able to figure out from first principles when getting the 12 mini (and now the 13).
It's fine to want a phone which is small like the mini, as powerful as the base model, and which lasts just as long on a charge. But I don't see how any company could deliver that phone.
Usually when that's invoked with Apple, it's a misapplication of the general principle of simplicity, used to create a blanket ban against features desired by a superminority.
Even just given TFA, we can see that's not how Apple operates in practice, and in context, TFA describes in detail of how Apple says it wants to flesh out more of these type of features for years on iPad, and it hasn't.
Most damning: _the feature exists_. But obscured. It ain't about simplicity.
Think about storage, notifications, app management, etc.
So I’m not sure the infra for those edu and commercial use cases would work elegantly “as is” for a family setup.
It's not trivial but I'm not going to give a trillion dollar company reprieve for a feature standardized in all of its competition.
Like Apple sole focus in the last 10 years has been on insuring profit growth at all cost, annoying many customers in the process.
You are dangerously naive.
I think outsiders see this. There is something a bit 'off' about the loyalty of the customers. The other day I saw a family wear micky mouse ears in public. Someone else can define the difference between fandom and mental illness.
Apple and Tesla are unique in the levels of brandd zealotry they seem to induce. Nintendo users for example are unlikely to only ever use a Nintendo device...they may own other consoles or play other games on a computer.
Apple and Tesla users tend to only own and use those devices to the exclusion of everything else, which feeds the myopia.
They argue for things that are counter to their own interests. It's difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion that I'm arguing with AI or a paid employee.
The existence of these people proves that there is something fundamentally different between my life experience and theirs. I must be missing a lot of context for why they act like they do.
- factory reset the device
- delete all your emails
- dismiss a (very important notification/message)
- spend $$$k on micro transactions
- change a random setting you never knew existed and don't realise why things suddenly stopped working
(I'm thinking here of young kids below the "understand the technology/responsibility well" age, possibly not able to read yet)
Otherwise, they can do things like delete incoming chat messages you haven't yet read, delete any/all notes/photos/ etc, and a hundred similar things — and in many cases, it's easy to do accidentally.
https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
Iwatch was a master class in that bullshit. Took long enough but people did eventually realize it’s a shittier smaller phone lol (but we’re talking genuine levels of shittier).
I love my Apple Watch. I can leave my house, make payments be fully contactable, access useful information about weather, stonks, work pager messages etc. while weaving a heavy clunky device at home and no distractions like social media. It’s also a fitness tracker and saved people I know who have heart conditions lives. I have the ultra abs the battery life is wonderful too.
Like, a device that can literally save your life is shit ?
You’re a hacker news reader so more like an “elite” user of technology. Most people aren’t and won’t do things like read the Apple Watch EULAs on the watch, setup payment cards on the watch alone. I don’t think it’s even possible to setup the eSIM and number syncing without the phone yet. It seems tied to your phones IMEI.
Maybe Apple would make a UX for the small minority of people like yourself, but they already have a lot of stuff going on and I guess it’s not financially viable to satisfy everyone in all situations.
They couldn’t sell less watches if they allowed what I suggest becuase they could always allow the option of tying it to a phone. Instead of having stupid things like an app keep track of how often you are on your phone how about give people an option of not having a phone? Let people have the connectivity they want in case of emergencies and to communicate without needing a phone.
Oh another use case I think is important, the app store, who would that work on the watch? how do you have reviews etc?
I still think the phone is kind of "required" currently.
Tim Cook has bragged about being able to do most of his work on an iPad, and I believe him, because executives spend most of their time reading and replying to e-mail. The iPad does that well because it inherited the Mail app from iPhones, which was already pretty good and just needed to be blown up to a larger size. And iPads make your organization look futuristic, at least to all the other executives you're talking to.
The only reason why people are complaining about iPadOS' limitations is because Apple made the mistake of making it useful for creative professionals. They wanted to ship the Apple Pencil and wound up making it an iPad accessory rather than its own thing. So now people who want to draw with the Pencil - which is an amazing drawing experience - are saddled with the limitations of an iPad.
Only because Apple hasn't enabled the use case through their OS. It's not an inherent limitation of the hardware anymore.
However, user switching seems to be a features more on lower priced budget devices for world markets where individual people cant afford their own devices. When you are rich enough to live in the western world and buy Apple products, you dont share them!
Example: "Hey uncle ping00, can I use your iPad real quick to watch something?" "Sure nephew, <switches profile to Guest ,and hands it over> go nuts"
At least on Mac you are able to do this..
I agree they should just enable guest accounts etc, just thought this was a workaround in the meantime
Guided access covers some of that, but I really don't think it's the whole story. Rather than locking everything to a single app, I'd rather something more like a guest session that sees all the apps, just all of them in a logged-out state... no messages, no emails, no calendar, no banking info, no history for Google Maps or open tabs/autocomplete in the browser, none of it.
But perhaps that feature is really just a subset of the broader users/profiles request that is being made here, because then I could have separate users for "primary" and "family" on my phone, and the "family" user would still enjoy continuity from session to session (game progress, previously visited YouTube videos, whatever) but in a separate universe from the continuity of the primary user.
I'd even argue that children that aren't old enough to have their own device (IMO before high school) don't need a personal profile. And on that tangent, kids shouldn't even use phones/tablets device unless they can responsibly use them.
For example, if you log out of a secondary profile and log back in, all your widgets will be gone. I don't have the bug link handy but IIRC, it's been open since 2021.
Mostly I’m annoyed that all the individual streaming apps have profiles, but they don’t have any link to the Apple ID you’re using. If I’m the active user on the AppleTV, I should see the apps I care about and my profile in those apps.
TL;DR stop letting my family ruin my recommendations.
if they made ipad's multiuser capable (it's is perfectly easy to do it technically) ipad sales would tank.
they will never do that to their sales figures.
the single user nature of the ipad is not a deficiency but a feature.
And the crazy part is: just like this article, everyone overlooks it.
Pay attention, and you'll notice it. (sorry to everyone who had blanked it out). Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words. It's agonizing once you think about it, and Apple (nor Google, as far as I know) has done zero to fix it in years (a decade?).
I have reached the point where I believe it is a fundamental flaw in _all_ touch-screen interfaces. I would certainly love to see better alternatives.
1. Bring back deep presses, which isn't very discoverable, but it's memorable once you get used to it, and make it immediately position the cursor. 2. Allow touching with two fingers. If they're next to each other, immediately position the cursor. Spread them and the selection widens. 3. Allow double-tap to select a word. 4. Double-tap and drag to select word by word. 5. Pinch on a selection to cut. 6. Deep press on a selection and drag-swipe in different directions to copy, cut, and formatting options. 7. Deep press on an unselected spot and drag-swipe in different directions to paste and other options.
> Bring back deep presses, which isn't very discoverable, but it's memorable once you get used to it.
Apple does this with many gestures already. Double tap to select a word for example. I think bringing back deep press would be a great move, and agree with everything else you've said here on that.
> 2. Allow touching with two fingers. If they're next to each other, immediately position the cursor.
Long press will put the cursor where your finger is, and will give you a magnified bubble for finer selection (did you really mean to select before or after the hyphen?)
> Spread them and the selection widen ... Pinch on a selection to...
these pinch style gestures would be unusable on a 5" screen I think, and incredibly fiddly even on a 10.1" iPad screen. I work in games, and even though our controllers can handle multiple inputs, we generally tend to avoid chorded inputs because the average person's dexterity is not as good as you would think.
It can be reduced in portrait mode, but should be there in landscape at least. That gives intuitive and ultra precise navigation, standard copy/paste, word by word navigation, fast and precise selection etc.
And it's also super helpful for selection even outside of text fields.
On iOS/iPadOS, touch-hold the virtual space bar and it becomes a trackpad for fine positioning of the cursor.
Magic Keyboard is a laptop-quality input device where capslock can be remapped to Esc for vim editing in ssh.
"add a keyboard" isn't an answer.
The best keyboard in the history of mobile computing was by Blackberry.
Blackberry (original and clone) physical keyboards are now available for both Android & iPhone, with some effort.
Sadly we never got a hardware successor for the dearly departed N900 Maemo and N9 Meego.
More importantly, it’s not realistic to think it will ever be as good as a real keyboard for lot of text entry. I expect dictation to do a better job for data entry.
In fact, this comment was created using dictation on an iPad, almost flawless, not much editing needed afterwards, and you can always use a keyboards if you prefer.
Demo - https://twitter.com/ashconnor/status/1776689029700075749/vid...
I have my own keyboard layout that I use since at least 2011, with drivers for macOS, windows, and Linux. I have no way to make it available on my iPad.
[1] https://qmk.fm/
[2] https://zmk.dev/
Perhaps, like the dying art of handwriting in cursive or the decline in knowing how to drive manual transmission, this just how things will be?
If this were truly such a fundamental problem, why hasn’t some enterprising Android vendor found success with smartphones using Blackberry-style hardware keyboards?
Fwiw, I used Blackberries back before the 2007 iPhone launch and never found it addicting the way others did.
My older iPad gave up the ghost recently and my old MacBook Pro is pretty heavy by today's standards to travel by air with. I don't really work on trips any longer so when I get home, I'll likely get one of the new iPad Airs with accessories and just traveling with a Macbook. (My lightweight Chromebook also went so far out of support, it doesn't work any longer--about 12 years old.
I'm not a touch typist 150 WPM weenie, but the "1-2 fingers per hand" hunt and peck typists are EXTREMELY slow. Think 10-20 WPM, lots of errors, etc.
It really is one of the areas where if you invest into getting to 30-50-80 WPM, you will save a lot of time if your job involves lots of writing.
Oh well, it is what it is.
For me, the iPad is mostly a surface for writing on, general admin tasks and basic image editing. The Apple Pencil is the best input device I find. It's not a complete replacement device - it's complementary. Also my 11" iPad Pro is smaller than any laptop and charges off the same charger as my phone so it goes everywhere with me. I'm about to jump on a plane and it has a week's worth of entertainment, music, textbooks, notepad and Lightroom on it and a pencil stuck on the side. This is just perfect for me. But try and replace a macOS machine with it and you might as well chop your fingers off.
The keyboard case is mostly ok but I just never use it. I should probably bounce it on eBay at some point but I keep it around "just in case".
Edit: most of the people I know who use iPads got them mostly for the Apple Pencil support.
> For me, the iPad is mostly a surface for writing on, general admin tasks and basic image editing.
I think that's pretty much what the business model grew into and is now cultivated and enforced. There is no Macbook convenient for consumption and no tablet convenient for processing. Either one can do both, but it's cumbersome.
Apple knows they can get their target group to buy both products, so they take care to keep those territories isolated.
And that's also revealing the general handicap the iPad Pro has: It is a product designed to close this gap, running on a OS designed to consciously maintain this gap.
I can connect my laptop to enormous monitors and have a lovely movie watching experience. Connect a projector to it, huge speakers, 4k resolution, HDR and whatnot.
What's so much better about content consumption on an iPad that a PC cannot do? The fucking iPad really grinds my gears, it's the most woeful marker of our environmental excesses. Where even a supercomputer smartphone and a hypercomputer computer isn't enough for people. Lamentable.
If I'm traveling, an iPad is great to watch movies in my hotel room while my partner is sleeping rather than blast the room with extra light and noise. This same scenario can also play out at home! I want to be near my partner but that doesn't mean I need to take over the entire room. We have technology that enables that dynamic now. And my argument against using a laptop in this scenario is largely focused on ergonomics. It's really easy to prop an iPad on my lap and watch Netflix for 3 hours instead of worrying about my laptop overheating on the duvet or needing to be plugged in.
Reading books is also another great consumption medium that is personal to me, even if yes, technically I can read an epub on any computer (and I have read many comics online at a desktop!).
It's not that the PC is incapable of playing back the same media, it's that the form factor of an iPad is often _better_ for any number of scenarios with the tradeoffs of weight/bulk being a more deciding factor in the moment. Sometimes I just want to watch The Office in a comfy chair at a cafe with a latte and an iPad is an extremely convenient medium to fulfill that goal.
About the only place I find a tablet a better form factor for watching movies is on a cramped airplane seat.
That said, iPad is more convenient when in a bed because you can more easily put it away when you get sleepy, you can read sideways, it's more resilient if in a good case, etc. I never carry laptop to bed, while iPad is part of my go-to-sleep routine since v1.
You can more easily use it on your bed, sofa and toilet.
I can easily put my iPad on the handle bars of my exercise bike, but not a laptop, much less a desktop.
If you're reading a book, holding it in your hands works a lot better than looking at it at twice the distance. Same way checking a map at arms length and pinch/zoom right there.
Long movies benefit less from the form factor, but youtube for instance works better.
For what it's worth, 2in1 computers are IMHO pretty good these days. The hinges improved a lot they give the best of both world.
Amen, brother!!
Languages constantly change and that's delightful. But there is a class of changes that are deliberate manipulation for commercial or propaganda purposes. Often the idea is to hollow out the word and insert a new meaning into the husk, so listenera (at least initially) get the associations of the old meaning while it is transformed into a new one.
I hate this because it is deceptive, and I also hate it when no handy way remains to specify the original meaning ("plastic fleece" would be silly and redundant these days; you can't usefully say "real fleece" any more, so what term do you use?)
"Consuming" a book would mean destroying it ("consumed by fire"). Economists use this for the action of people who buy rivalrous goods or services -- a logical and obvious metaphor. But the use of "content" and "consumption" were deliberate coining: "content" expells any differentiation of what it refers to, applying an equivalence to user-generated work, commercial speech, advertising, propaganda, whatever; "consume" reinforces a corporate producer -> passive consumer mentality that again strips away the agency of the person actually looking at the screen.
Just part of the incessant effort to turn the Internet into "a remote control with a buy button".
You can use it on the craper, and can hold it with one hand on the bed or sofa, even lying on your back. Battery lasts a very good while (like 3x the time laptop bateries lasted when the iPad came out, modern AS laptops have caught up).
It also doesn't have all the other macOS maintainance, options, and junk I don't need for the content consumption I do with the iPad (browsing, youtube, netflix, books and magazines, social media for those whose that's their thing).
I mean that kind of extra portability/convenience is the whole purpose of tablets. It's not like they're some totally different technology and can do things a laptop can't do. It's a marginal convenience thing for those aspects.
Had 2 pencils, broke both within 1 week when they rolled of the table…
(PSA: if the recent change annoys you to no end, as it did me, you can get back the previous editing behavior by turning off spellchecker in OS settings.)
Not counting source code, I type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it.
> Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words.
None of those are slow. You know you can:
1) tap anywhere in text to move the cursor?
2) long tap (and drag if desired) to do the same ignoring word boundaries?
3) hold spacebar to move the cursor around the text?
Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all?
Yes, if you like pain and insist on typing on a screen keyboard (I guess I do), certain text adjustments would be marginally slower than with a hardware keyboard, but on the other hand if you normally type English then swipe-typing more than compensates for that.
Wouldn't be as big of a problem if the spellchecker was not absolute garbage and handled multi-language text input, or just worked well for a single language. Honestly, I don't think the team working on the keyboard at apple has any linguists or any kind of diversity to pay attention to nothing but the most milktoast of English language use.
You can tap and hold with three fingers to bring up the clipboard bar which has icons for undo, redo, cut, copy, and paste. Assuming that's what you mean by "access the clipboard"?
> I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters.
Your description reminds me of how it felt after that recent OS update I mentioned, until I realized I can turn off spellchecker to restore the previous typing behaviour. Now the copy/paste popover and drag-selection work every time, but I have to really watch for typos.
Like me, you were used to previous behaviour, and the new one is unfamiliar to the point of broken. I agree that Apple has royally screwed up here by making this the default behavior in iOS 17.
However, it’s a bit disingenuous to say it was always broken if it only started working differently in the latest version.
> why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard
On iPad, if you bring up a large keyboard by pinch-zooming the small one, you get those buttons on screen keyboard. (On an external keyboard, the normal macOS copy-paste key combos work always.)
1. Long-tap with your right thumb, drag the cursor to the end of a sentence 2. Tap with your left thumb (to the left of your right thumb) and drag to the left to select the sentence -- nothing happens 3. Drag your right thumb to the right to make sure you understand what's happening and you're doing it right -- the selection extends, yay! 4. Again try dragging your left thumb -- nothing happens.
How could Apple's human interaction people let this ship?!
I copy and pasted this on an iPhone - I tapped the comment box which summoned the keyboard, and I tapped again and it gave me Paste/Autofill as options.
> On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here?
This is out of the box functionality on iOS. I had a samsung device before, and I had no end of issues with the keyboard failing to summon, certain apps refusing to use my preferred keyboard, password managers not working properly, inconsistent selection/focus/edit dialog behaviour. I don't get _any_ of those issues with iOS.
This behaviour is a mess, IME. iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong. I regularly find words or lines it will refuse to position the cursor into, instead insisting on moving to the line above or below. Line breaks seem to confuse it too. I often have to position the cursor the word before the line break, insert my new text and then reposition to delete the old text.
2) + 3) The rhythm to engage this vs the one to engage selection is completely opaque to me. I still don't know how to engage selection intentionally, successfully. I've owned iPhones since the 3s.
A couple of times per week it happens for me that the cursor chooses to land on the wrong side of white space or such, but that is infrequent enough and easy to fix that it does not bother me.
Try selecting multiple paragraphs on a website, for example. The behavior is generally unpredictable and requires lots of fiddling. Deselecting text requires yet more work. Double-tapping a word should select the word itself, but that's often not the case. And it's not just websites where the DOM adds complexity; the same erroneous behavior exists for native apps.
For example, open an iMessage text and paste one or more images. Now go back and try to edit existing text. Or add new text. Moving the cursor and text selection is non-deterministic and requires scrolling and fiddling, manually adding line breaks, and then removing them just to get the formatting correct.
In other words, as the OP mentioned, text editing has been problematic on iOS/iPadOS for ages. Interestingly, VisionOS, which perhaps has the most challenging input and editing environment, has managed to resolve many of these issues.
While initial VisionOS releases were buggy and nearly unusable, it's rather striking that you can now use your eyes to move and edit text with more precision than what's possible on iOS/iPadOS--which tells you how much room there is for improvement.
I never until today thought of pasting images. I always add them using the Photos button, then just write my message as normal.
I see now how moving cursor around rich text with embedded objects is glitchy, and I imagine if you deal with that on daily basis it could be frustrating.
However, none of the other issues you or others described seem to be reproducible on my phone. Double-tap to select, or tap to place cursor, seem to just work in regular plain text areas.
The default UITextInputStringTokenizer prefers to place the caret at word boundaries. I implemented exact placement for my coding app, Codea, and wrote about the text system extensively here: https://sim.coffee/textual-healing/
Exact caret placement is actually surprisingly effective with a reasonable font size. I wish Apple offered it as a preference system-wide
Selection defaults to a double-tap to select at the word granularity. Triple tap will select at the paragraph granularity. This is customisable in your own apps, though the system defaults to the one specific to your current language
For me it's closer to 100% of the time because it is incapable of letting you tap one word over, you have to tap far away then where you want, because it simply will NOT listen when you tap to a neighboring word, it will move the cursor right back to the word it's on.
I have made a screen recording, but am too lazy to figure out a way to share it.
It almost sounds like a few repliers here are using some other phone, or ignored the point I made previously about the spell checker. I feel your pain but I can help no more.
It turns out I had ignored the point about the spell checker. I had turned off auto-correction, but left on checking/underlining. So I apologise for that.
So I turned off the checker and it's noticeably better, but still not ideal. The first attempt I made got the word wrong by one. I continued with more success but found other strange issues.
For example: If I gently long-press, I get a tiny popup showing the words either side of the cursor magnified slightly. This seems a modern implementation of the old "magnifying glass" feature. This "magnifier" follows the cursor works if you then drag left/right and sometimes up. If you drag down, it disappears. It's smaller than the original magnifying glass, and closer to the cursor (and your finger) so it's less useful... and why close it when dragging down??
> I can help no more
I think you misunderstand the intent of my post. I wasn't asking for help. I was venting, and attempting to show that Apple have handled this interaction badly. Like... really f*king badly. It's a mess. How is turning off spell checking an acceptable "solution"? The fiddliness and erratic experience should not have passed QA. Or... perhaps the company should review the intentions it has for these platforms. I put up with it on my phone because it's small enough that it cannot be anything other than shit for most tasks (especially for people like me with poor vision). But they're trying to claim iPadOS is a serious bit of kit for serious work, and it fails at stuff that was largely solved for 30 years prior on "proper" computers.
You shouldn’t have to disable spell checking just to be able to edit text. That’s a workaround that shouldn’t be acceptable.
I’m impressed your spelling holds ip. Props. Mine’s gotten worse as I’ve aged!
Yes you would just like a lot of other people do - because the device is truly portable, so you can suffer more inconvenience to use it everywhere to communicate in immediate mode
> Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all?
No it won't, I've changed those bad defaults with macos-only apps
> You know you can
Yes I do, and still agree with the OP that the software support is bad and none of the things you list are properly engineered despite the fact that direct analogue finger input has great potential
If it was as awfully inconvenient as some here claim, I would reply to comments or write emails on my laptop. It simply is not.
See the comment I originally replied to. “Horrifically broken”, “many steps” and so on.
Also, for me it is often about as fast to type as with a hardware keyboard thanks to swipe typing. Perhaps I think slow enough that it’s not a bottleneck. Pity you all fast thinkers, I suppose.
Editing is sometimes a bit slower, but also depends.
Spoiler -- the cursor will be before the word "going," after the space. It's possible to select after "is" -- for example, you can select after "going" if you're careful (I'd say you have to tap around the "n")
Of course I know about the long tap -- as I said, I've been doing roughly that since at least the deep press days. Open Safari, go to a typically long Amazon URL, and try to get to the end of the URL to edit something. Depending on the URL length, it requires:
1. Tap quickly so the whole URL isn't selected (otherwise you'll drag it)
Then multiple cycles of:
1. Long tap 2. Drag to the right 3. Reach the end of the screen, but not the URL 4. Back to (1)
The spacebar is the same as the long tap. It's better than nothing, but not sufficient.
And adding a keyboard doesn't fix the fundamental issue that Apple hasn't thought deeply about this.
Swipe-typing is a blessing and a curse. Think about what you have to do if:
1. You want to add an "s" to pluralize something 2. You just need to change the last letter or two 3. You want to add any other character right after the word besides the limited set Apple has deemed worthy of special treatment
And that is:
1. Type space 2. Type backspace 3. Type the actual thing you want to type
That's three actions to do one thing. And that doesn't even begin to cover how swipe typing handles alternatives: backspace and do it over? Really? How about automatically popping up alternatives for selection (and then dismissing if the user keeps swiping)?
I'm happy for you that you're happy. I'm not. Apple: hire me and I'll make this better. :-)
That's optimal for the "insert a word" use case. What would you have it do?
To be clear: I'm not saying that every choice Apple has made is the opposite of what makes sense. I'm saying that in many cases they could have increased usability, and that overall usability is bad enough that editing is painful, substantially slower than on other platforms (MacOS) and that I think there are at least some use cases they could address, but they haven't.
Yes, with short words like “or” it is difficult to tap cursor to place it exactly before or after trailing punctuation; however, holding and dragging cursor to a precise position needed (thanks to magnifying glass) takes about a second to do.
Removing complete selection in a single-line input is a weak point of editing experience on iOS (it is easy in a textarea since you have space to just tap away).
Every iPhone super user I'm surrounded by (everyone) never talks about how awful the typing experience is and makes me feel like a luddite for not doing it well. I wasn't sure if they were just used to it or they just know how to use it correctly and I don't.
It's horrible. It's helped me a lot to stop pulling my phone out to use social media/web etc to pass time because if I can't click it, if i have to type in a URL or anything like that, I just don't want to even try.
I find typing extremely easy and fast for the most part, except when swipe-typing gets the wrong word.
The state of things is appalling, some cheap Android phones give better experience with typing/keyboard than the most expensive Apple phones (you get a proper number row in the first place, avoiding extremely annoying switching when working with numbers).
And I say that as someone who bought the first iPhone (literally imported it before it was even available in France), when the hardware was so superior to anything else on the market that it didn't matter as much that the software could be lacking in some ways.
Nowadays the hardware is still good (overpriced, at least in France) but the software is bad/annoying/lacking on so many levels it's just insane that Apple keeps getting away with selling so many expensive devices with deeply flawed software.
But there has been a slowdown in sales and their chip leadership doesn't matter as much as it used to (at least in phones), so maybe they will start improving their stuff. One can only hope.
> some cheap Android phones give better experience with typing/keyboard
There will always be a phone that beats iPhone in one way or another. There are Android phones with 6000 Hz PWM for low frequency flicker-sensitive people, Android phones with e-ink screens, Android phones with hardware keyboards, etc. However, they suck in other ways because of Android (horrifically insecure, often full of malware from Chinese vendors that requires being a hacker to weed out, lagging in accessibility, etc.) and bad hardware that quickly obsoletes, while iPhones are quite well-rounded and work for everyone on a more or less intuitive level despite what all the haters say about it being “abysmal” in one way or another.
While people are largely irrational when it comes to Apple stuff (the "reasons" people buy iPhone are largely emotional for the vast majority or buyers) they are not entirely stupid and Android phones have become much cheaper for very comparable hardware, when they will have to renew, they may switch. It's definitely a problem for Apple even if you don't think so.
In my country a base iPhone 15 is 970 euros while you can get a Pixel 8 for 600 euros. The phones are very comparable in hardware quality, there is no way an iPhone is 60% better. And there is no way it's going to provide 60% better value over its lifetime, that irrational "thinking" (emotional behavior) that comes with the purchase of luxury products. And I think it shouldn't be a luxury product, it serves no one but Apple to have a tool become a luxury status symbol. It's worse than other luxury products because they don't get a market share as large and they don't influence the purchase of other goods/services as much.
Android is as insecure as you allow it to be. No one I know with an Android phone ever complain to me about Chinese malware. And I'm the tech guy and I get asked about bugs, installation of 3rd party stores, ad blockers, rooting, DNS bypass but no malware. And many have Chinese phones (Huawei and Xiaomi mostly). You just have irrational fears instilled by bullshit marketing and emotional "arguments" from believers. It's a bit like the alarm salespeople who find a way to sell their "solution" that costs more overtime than what it is supposed to protect. Good sales pitch, I guess.
As for the hardware, Android phones do not become obsolete quicker than iPhones (quite the contrary in fact). Since Google and Samsung announced 7 years of support, that cannot be a valid argument anymore. Also, I know from experience that Apple is, in fact, the one to blame. Under the guise of "free updates" they make their hardware become too slow or insufficient in a way that makes it borderline useless while not even providing all the functionalities announced in the update for older hardware. How nice of them to save themselves the trouble of actually supporting an OS instead of conveniently just pushing a single OS on everyone to ease their maintenance burden even though very few will actually want/benefit from the new stuff.
For example, when I sold my Apple Watch Series 3 it became impossible to update it without erasing the whole thing. It received no worthwhile functionality in exchange, most of the new stuff was locked to the new watches (precisely the reason I changed in the first place) and the new software made it slower and have less battery life. To add insult to the injury, it is impossible to go back on an update so you are basically stuck with hardware that is not completely useless but has lost much of its value as a tool. All that to keep the thing compatible with their phone OS.
The only reason I didn't feel bad about selling it is because I sold it cheap to a friend and I take care of the issues for him and he just uses it as a simple watch. He wanted to look cool without spending too much money and he has no use of any of the functionalities, which is the majority of Apple Watch users in my experience. I use it as a sport watch (swimming/running) but my next one will be a real sports watch. Outside of that use case it's pointless and Apple behavior around softwares/update is too bad to invest more money in a product that is lackluster and deeply flawed despite all the years/profits they had.
I think you are largely convinced by emotions about Apple stuff. They have some benefits and are well made but as far as my experience tells me, the major benefit is mostly how people will look at you.
It's a bit like arguing that a BMW is a better car than a Toyota. Yeah sure, but in practice both will let you lose your permit (depending on model, one much faster than the other) and both will carry you to the same places if they are functionally comparable models. But some people still get the BMW, not because there is a particularly good reason for it but because they like how people will look at them and treat them because of it. Unsurprisingly most of this group tends to be young males. The iPhone is basically the same, expect it is a different target demographic, that is larger (younger person, predominantly females).
It’s such a goddamn chore.
Look at the pictures here: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWR43LL/A/magic-keyboard-... -- does this device look significantly worse for text input than your typical laptop?
I'm totally with you: the iPad looks like a competent device from every angle. That's why it's so sad it's only the looks and you have to bend over backwards for basic stuff like selecting a text from a web page or an app straight touching the screen.
For comparison, as much as Windows is ugly and inelegant, there's no basic action on a Surface Pro that requires an attached touch pad.
The range of pro/power users happy with the iPad right now looks awfully small to me.
[0] https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-computers/wacom-mob...
people who want to use their iPad primarily for writing will want a keyboard + touchpad
people who want to use their iPad primarily for drawing probably won't want a keyboard or touchpad
I don't know why someone would choose an iPad for drawing rather than a MobileStudio Pro, you'd have to ask someone who draws on an iPad.
Personally, my iPad is purely a video and reading device, so I'm not the target audience for either. I'm guessing you aren't either.
On how much it's filling them correctly, outside of people's feelings we only have a few indicators; I'd say this few years' steadily declining sales could be the best summary ?
> Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text
4 taps - beginning of word, quote, end of word quote.
> to correct a misspelling
double tap on word, start typing the correct one. Double tap the word, and use the "replace" dropdown. Or, tap and use spacebar as a cursor to selectively edit a single word. This is certainly no worse than a mouse, but it is sub par to a physical keyboard.
> to rearrange some words
I'm not sure what you mean here, as I can't say that I find myself doing this often, so maybe I'm not your target audience here.
Why can't I select the correct location and just backspace one or two characters instead? Android handles it perfectly fine, and has for more than a decade.
> I'm not sure what you mean here, as I can't say that I find myself doing this often, so maybe I'm not your target audience here.
Copy-paste menu is very finicky. Sometimes it appears, sometimes it doesn't, the selection marks seem to miss the mark occasionally as well.
> Why can't I select the correct location and just backspace one or two characters instead
Press and hold and it will drop the cursor where you want.
There's no technical problem for Apple. It's ONLY that they don't want us to use macOS on iPads. There's really no excuse.
I'm not sure where this aesthetic comes from — that somehow traditional desktop/laptops are an outmoded way of computing and that touchy, file-manager-less, terminal-less, tool-less computer use is the way we all ought to be doing things.
People will often talk about the disconnection between the elite and the regular people which can also be found in the relation of manager to worker. And this is exactly a reproduction of that.
When you don't really need to use the tools to make useful stuff there is no way to understand how inadequate they can be. Since they know how much they can profit from iOS with the App Store, they try to push it as much as possible, ignoring the fact that even if everybody wanted/agreed to do that it wouldn't even be technically possible, regardless of profits/prices considerations.
There is no worse leader than one that doesn't periodically put himself in the position of the people he is leading. Tim Cook is unable to do that and he has imposed a feminine way of working: collaboration enforced by a pecking order determined by a social construct that doesn't care much about competence/capabilities and the values of ideas/work on their own merit.
Now Apple will keep making good hardware because they have talents that know what they are doing and they have the means to throw money at basically any problem. But the finer details won't improve anymore, they refuse to properly compete in the open market and they refuse to compete internally because they now work on a model following feminin ideals that is not conductive to improvements.
This is why the state of current Apple offerings is very frustrating: it's not going to improve in a cost matter because they clearly like their profits too much and it's not going to improve in a quality/functionality way because they just don't have the structure to do so anymore.
Things will change, but probably not for the better and if so, it will probably be pure coincidence. Many of their passionate customer are intuitively making this realization which is why even the most diehard fans are starting to be pissed off (new iPads review sentiment is rather grim, even worse than their AVP that didn't do anything new or useful).
The keyboard works decent but deleting, selecting, spellchecking, editing, undo is an exercise in frustration.
Like I can’t believe we’re over a decade into this and the delete key still does the thing were it goes from painfully deleting letter by letter for far too long, the. Jumping to words for a moment the. Suddenly deleting huge blocks and sometimes this can’t be undone
I don't know, it always worked fine for me, and I edit text a lot (writing on the iPad, not coding).
>And the crazy part is: just like this article, everyone overlooks it
Given the above, maybe not so crazy? Maybe you're too fussy?
>Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text;
Why not put them when as you write it, in which case it's quote text quote? Is that not what one does 90% of the time?
And if you remembered it later, how slow it is to just move the cursor to start and end of segment? With the spacebar cursor-move mode it's almost as fact as having a mouse.
>to correct a misspelling
Tap on squiggly-underlined word, accept correct spelling from suggestions?
>and Apple (nor Google, as far as I know) has done zero to fix it in years (a decade?)
Do what exactly? What fancy UI you have in mind that solves it?
And if you do that much writing, why don't you just hook a bluetooth keyboard? Then with some shortcuts to jump by whole words/start-end of line/etc, you can fly, as you would on a laptop.
I agree with the parent. "You're holding it wrong." /s
Do you genuinely believe your response is helpful? Just like the OC, I too have noticed the atrocious editing and word manipulation in iOS and, just like OC, I have been text editing for my entire life. iOS is objectively bad at it, in many specific ways. The only way to improve it is for us to be honest about how it can be better and go from there. Coping with the issues as if they dont even exist is not a good path forward.
Rather, I'm saying: "it works, period" (on all machines).
The OC said it himself: "everyone overlooks it". Perhaps because it's not really there for them, and you're just more fussy ones?
>Do you genuinely believe your response is helpful?
Do you genuinely believe that any complain is legitimate?
The purpose of my comment wasn't to help with it (since I don't consider it broken): it was to counter the idea that "editing text is horrifically broken".
>iOS is objectively bad at it, in many specific ways.
If it was "objectively bad" I and the other commenter wouldn't be able to refuse it, nor would "everyone overlook it".
Something can be objectively bad without you noticing its failures. Consensus does not guide objectivity.
>Do you genuinely believe any complain is legitimate?
No, just legitimate ones.
>The OC said it himself: "everyone overlooks it". Perhaps because it's not really there for them, and you're just more fussy ones?
Fussy means to be overly caring about unimportant details. However, I would not call this issue unimportant.
It tracks it much better than outlier opinion though.
>Fussy means to be overly caring about unimportant details. However, I would not call this issue unimportant.
A feature might be important, but the complains about the feature can still be for fussy things that don't matter (or just be wrong).
Like complaing about how hard it is to use a trackpad instead of a mouse, and how Apple should fix this "somehow" on its laptops.
You: why no [type correctly in the first place so editing isn't necessary]?
How does that even remotely answer the original objection?
You: With the spacebar cursor-move mode it's almost as fact as having a mouse.
I just did a quick check: with a mouse in this comment I can select insert points about once a second, maybe a bit faster. Before words in iOS I can do better than that: maybe 0.75 of a second? So yay! Then after: works for long words, fails for short words. Then in the words: tap-hold-drag to the spot, maybe once every two seconds. Then there was the time when iOS for no apparent reason selected the word instead of before the word. Then no amount of tapping will fix that until I tap <somewhere else> and then tap back where I want the insertion point. That took 3-4 seconds. Then there was the time when the tap-hold-drag option zoomed several lines above where my finger actually was, and I futzed with it trying to make it right, and eventually managed to not insert the cursor where I wanted. That took over five seconds and then I had to do it again to make it right. The logic of when the little zoom bubble shows up feels arbitrary.
If the misspelling bit worked correctly, that would be great. Sometimes it just wants to select the word.
So yeah, editing is broken.
One of the perks of lock-in is that you don't have to stress over every defect in your product.
Nerds like us who care about running code on our machines are really the minority. Just look how little volume and revenue Apple gets from the mac (if they were run like most businesses they would have sold off or shut down the mac business long ago)
All the big tech companies are guilty of illegally suppressing competition in various ways, including locking customers into their platforms through various means.
But Apple? Nobody goes as hard as Apple does with their lock-in strategies. I personally like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I'm not going to assume you're just being ignorant because you love Apple. Instead, I'm curious to know what makes you doubt that lock-in isn't their entire business model?
For example, in what universe would iCloud (as it exists today) succeed if customers could actually choose an alternate cloud storage provider for their iPhone/iPad with the same level of system integration?
I have used android and windows. It's just that the Apple stuff tends to suck less (but not always, per the examples above).
How would you implement it instead?
IIRC editing text was barely even possible when the phone first came out. No cut/paste! I think it arrived in the same software release as the app store.
I frequently give up on writing things on my phone, saving them either for when I am at a computer with a real keyboard, or just not at all in many cases.
iPhone however? I've given up on the sub-word level. And it's amazing because they could simply copy Androids logic.
Its as if there aren’t real people at Apple actually using and testing what they release (although I know that’s not the case) For now my work around is long pressing the spacebar to get the cursor to where you want. :(
Personally, as mentioned in the article, the lack of multiple audio streams (or background audio) is very annoying. If you play any audio from Safari it completely pauses what your doing in other apps like YouTube or Twitch. So when you're done with Safari you have to go back into those apps and resume them.
Stage manager is glitchy on external displays. There are a lot of known shippable bugs in stage manager. Bugs that haven't been fixed in years.
Most unfortunately of all, as a utility, there's no developer tools. When you do software development for an iPad you usually have to put it into developer mode. Why not pull down Xcode, Xcode cli tools, and a terminal emulator as well as enable the developer section of the App Store as part of enabling developer mode? There's no reason for things not to work like this.
I want an iPad that runs one app at a time, no hot corners, no swiping from edges.
I, alongside seemingly everyone else, get frustrated that the OS doesn’t have more complex features. But for most of our moms, it’s probably better for them. The rest of us have macOS, Linux, etc.
There's absolutely no reason the iPad can't have both, as in a simple kiosk mode for old people to call someone, and then a "Power-user" toggle in the setting for those who want to enable the more complex features.
And what if I want to add them? Most likely other users would to if the SW support was there and you could run Mac apps on the iPad once you connected the keyboard and mouse.
Apps made for keyboard and mouse suck on touch&pen devices and vice versa (even if the device is basically able to run both) because most devs pick just one mode of interaction and optimize their UI for it, while the other mode is just “supported” as an afterthought.
That’s why I believe Apple decided to have separate devices for each mode of interaction, each with its own distinct OS&app ecosystem.
My mother in law insists on having the newest iPhone every year. It spends 95% of its time in the bottom of her purse, turned off. 1% of time is phone calls. The other 4% of its time is my MIL complaining about how complex it is while she laboriously dials a number. Realistically, she should just buy a dumb phone[0].
A complex tool like a smart phone or a computer has a duty to provide its user with the capabilities they need, even if providing such capabilities requires a complex UI. You can only make something as user friendly as possible. After a certain point, making something easier to use requires you to remove features.
This is why professional software, like CAD software or DAWs or programming languages, has a leaning curve. It is a tool that you are expected to have to learn to use. If your tool is too complex for your needs, return it and buy a simpler tool. Buying an iPad or iPhone just to make phone calls is like buying a stand mixer with all of the attachments when all you needed was a wooden spoon.
[0] Except that the iPhone is a status symbol now
Nobody said they do need it, it's just the HN trope that Apple devices are "so easy to use" that they'd somehow be better for the elderly, because devices form Windows and Android tend to nag you with more pop-ups and complex questions.
(Of course, her solution often is to use a dedicated device for the card game and a dedicated device for Zoom, but this is an expensive solution for something the OS could be designed to handle well, and even if you can afford it it's a mediocre to bad solution.)
You turn on simple mode, then you turn on split screen. All controls optimized to be simple, discoverable, and no hidden controls (as opposed to a normal mode, where all controls should be fast, intuitive, and keep you in a flow).
My parents don't want any of these features, and to be honest I don't really want them either.
I think the gestures are just not a great way to go for the elderly, for a few reasons. First, gestures are not explicit, you have to discover them, be told about them, see them used by someone else. Second (and this one deserves subclassing) is motor control. Finger-tapping speed, for one, declines notably with age. Fine motor control, for the gestures, can also be impaired with age. Third, there's a lack of feedback when using gestures: no haptics, no titles to relay during phone calls, no "you just closed this program by swiping up!"
Maybe my Samsungs had a lot of gestures I wasn't aware of but I feel like most things on the phone were very intuitive. Example, to end an incoming call and not just mute the ringtone you need to hit the power button. I didn't know about this for weeks and would drive around annoyed at a phone call ringing (but muted) in my car because it would stop my music playing.
On Android the buttons are right on the screen, I forget exactly but it's something like swipe left to mute, right to decline, etc.
I had to actually google "how to decline phone call on iphone" awhile back.. push the power button. If Android did that I'm pretty sure there'd be an arrow saying "PUSH THIS TO DECLINE."
And people in this post are talking about doing 3 finger taps. I didn't even know that was a thing..
I'll never forget the first time I accidentally turned on my flashlight at a dark movie theater and panicked because I hadn't learned that you can turn it on/off in the pull down bar yet. I think I had it on some button shortcut that if I hit a few times it'd turn on, and I didn't know what button I'd hit.
For anyone else that wants to find it, just search for 'multi' in the settings app, and the third result will take you to the Multitasking & Gestures settings panel.
Assistive Access, https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-ipad/set-up...
Assistive Access is a distinctive iPadOS experience that makes it easier for people with cognitive disabilities to use iPad independently. Essential apps and experiences have been optimized for Assistive Access—items onscreen are bigger, features are more focused, and it’s easier to navigate and understand what actions are possible.
https://9to5mac.com/2020/02/17/how-to-turn-off-ipad-multitas...
You can also enable the Assistive Touch on-screen button if the swipe up gesture is difficult
There are three choices now: Off, Split View & Slide Over, or Stage Manager.
The real trick with Settings though is that it has a search bar at the top of the sidebar (with no visual indication that it exists unless you find it by scrolling up past the top), so you can always use that instead of hunting through the many pages of settings.
Parent commenter should probably turn off the 4-finger app switching gesture and the 3-finger undo/redo/copy/paste gestures as well. Doesn't seem like a feature their mom will be learning to use on purpose.
Here’s a discussion from 2016 which cites an iPad user guide from 2015: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7534779?sortBy=best
Swipe home bar up and hold for a second: open app switcher
The home button was one of the best widely-deployed pieces of UI in computing history, and they got rid of it.
Here’s a decent video showing the principle: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ewhAR7BmoMM Note that he lets go when the UI hint shows up on the left, but no earlier.
iPad has a physical disadvantage relative to iPhones and Macs which leads to a touch experience that never quite feels as assured or 'locked in' as the others.
The reason as I see it is that both Mac and iPhone you have much greater physical device stability, and this device stability allows the software to be more fluid and responsive.
For instance, the iPhone's app switch swipe gesture work really well in a one-handed device, since things are generally in reach and you have your fingers holding on the back of the device to stabilize it. As a result, you can switch apps very quickly.
That same app switching gesture feels awkward and is often mis-fired on iPad. The fluid responsiveness of the home bar and app switcher makes the whole experience feel less solid, because the device itself is less stable in-hand.
I think it may have been a mistake to port the home bar over to iPad, and they should have gone with either a physical button-based solution, or a press and hold then swipe solution. Specifically the bottom of the device that is closest to the user should not have anything trigger actions, that's the worst. Multitasking is also too easy to trigger, but that's not quite as bad. Notification & control center shades aren't that bad.
Either you have a stable device and a twitchy app switcher, or you have an unstable device and a solid app switcher. You can't have both be unstable.
(fwiw I'm a huge iPad fan as well as worked on a new tablet computer myself. I love the form factor but recognize it's fighting an uphill battle touch-wise)
When they announced it, I was so hyped because sometimes I had issues with TouchID (sweating finger after workouts, dirty finger when cooking, or damaged finger after swimming/handwork) but in practice it turned out to be so annoying.
It doesn't work when you don't look at it straight, it doesn't work when there is not enough light, it doesn't work when there is too much light... Even if you disable the "require attention" setting, it is extremely annoying to unlock during driving (basically requiring you to take your head off the road) and it will randomly fail for no particular reason anyway. To add insult to the injury, it makes Apple Pay a stupid 2-step process where you have to insistently look at your phone before putting it on the terminal. I don't use my Apple Watch for Apple Pay either because it requires you to awkwardly twist your arm, since the signal can only go out from the glass display, because they chose aluminium for what is basically a sport watch (to make it look premium with no real benefits since the most vulnerable part get scratched/broken easily anyway).
I don't know why people keep giving so much benefit to Apple because the current user experience is really not good for the price of their stuff.
I guess I don't have to care because after I figure out what I want as an Apple Watch replacement, I'll switch to Android for my next phone.
I hope it's going to improve things, it should, but I don't think it's going to solve the driving issue. I've looked to make an automation but as far as I can tell there is no way to change lock settings via automation (even just the duration of auto-locking).
Which is a general trend with Apple software nowadays. Too much focus on security at the cost of user freedom and ultimately functionality. They have made this automation software but so far, I have not found any use for it because there is always some limitation that makes it almost useless. Shortcuts are also a major pain to "develop", Automator and AppleScript were painful but somehow, it's even worse.
I'm constantly doing things with my iPad that I have no idea how to undo, other than by hitting the home button and starting over. I can't imagine how elderly and infirm people deal with these things.
I've tried using Apples devices ever since they dropped the home button, but it always kinda ends up being way more fiddly than it has any right to be. Very often you just accidentally end up closing apps because of the hanging scroll gesture, which on non-gesture devices (read: configured Android and old iOS) just meant "scroll when needed" but on iOS/gesture controlled Android means "close the app". Especially annoying when reading large amounts of text.
Gesture control over buttons is one of those ideas that's neat but should never have been made the only option on iOS.
What I think would satisfy a lot of users is if an iPad (And even an iPhone!) turned into a full-on Mac with full macOS with a keyboard and pointer attached. No need to create a convoluted hybrid touch+pointer UX that wouldn't be great at either, like Microsoft has proven. I simply want to be able to do more with the hardware I already own, and transfer files between my mobile/content consumption modes and when I'm creating/developing/working on something.
I know Apple just wants to sell more hardware, but what's happened instead is I've lost interest in getting an iPad altogether.
At some point people on here need to realise that these devices simply aren't designed for them.
And that expecting Apple to dilute the value proposition with unpopular features like DEX is kind of misguided.
And why I'm suggesting they start making what the people want.
No it's what you want. The people have spoken. Nobody is buying Dex. Everyone is buying iPads.
There is little to no demand for turning the iPad into some tablet-computer hybrid.
The iPad already is a tablet/computer hybrid, it just so happens to be kind of bad at it, which is why articles like these keep popping up. Apple already has an OS optimized for pointer control, just allow macOS to load up with the right hardware connected.
If you (or anyone else) doesn't want that experience... Don't? Nothing would be a forced change for anyone that doesn't want it.
Seems to me that they are doing just fine.
so a rather stark decline.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276635/market-share-held...
Does inflation adjusted revenue actually matter if cost to produce is lower and their market share is stable?
Nobody was talking about company-wide revenue, nor cross-comparing products like a desktop to a laptop, this is a discussion on the iPad.
>“sharp decline”
Misquote suggest this is no longer a productive conversation.
That was a mistake, I had meant stark and u intentionally mistyped it and I had quoted it already, but I agree that the conversation is not productive. However, its unproductive not because of the misquote, but of one party’s seemingly misunderstanding or perhaps avoidance of things like cost improvement factors, new competitors entering the market, and other consumer buying behaviors that might be involved when a new type of product is released to the public in favor a single cherry picked metric.
They are stagnating because the market is saturated.
The iPad is a "private" device, so there isn't any social pressure to have the latest model. You're not taking it out in public multiple times a day.
The use cases are also more limited, so even when the software support ends, there isn't that much incentive to upgrade. Streaming services still work, browser works and the drawing apps work, no point in getting a new one.
I've owned iPads since the 2nd gen and haven't had a single one's battery die on me. Every time the device physically broke (after being handed down twice) before the battery died.
I don't like it. My purchasing habits wrt apple products has diminished and is now near zero.
Without their nonsense, I would purchase mac products without thinking as a trusted tool.
Developers need flexibility, e.g. VMs isolated by Apple Silicon nested virtualization.
I also don't think you can't bring all this to a device like an iPad and not alienate part of the existing market.
iPad
iPad Mini
iPad Air 11/13, USB3
iPad Pro 11/13, USB4
iPad Pro 11/13 1TB+, USB4, 16GB, extra CPU core, matte [Ultra?]
(see how the "Air" used to mean "ultra-premium thin and light", but now the iPad Air is heavier than the Pro, and the MacBook Air is just a brand they slap on the entry level MacBook, a model so entry level it's now sold at WalMart -- and the 15' Air is only 90 grams weight difference than the 14' Pro)
(see the "Apple Pencil" and how it means like 4 different things, with 4 different feature sets, and needs a product matrix spreadsheet to know which Pencil is safe to use with any given iPad)
See how "Apple TV" is both a hardware product (Apple TV 4K) and a service (Apple TV subscription) and an App (the Apple TV app, available on iOS, but also Roku and others), and a platform (the "Apple TV platform", where you can load other streaming services like Disney+ or Hulu or Paramount, into the Apple TV platform, which lives inside the Apple TV app, on your Apple TV device).
"Pro" meaning "has active cooling" only works on 3 out of the 6 things currently labeled "Pro".
Just imagine if they offered a Mac without a keyboard, just the trackpad and the screen.
I agree, typing on a trackpad "keyboard" would suck, but on a Mac w/ a built in keyboard, that's superfluous. And who actually enjoys typing on an iPad on-screen keyboard?
Let’s take touchscreens for example. Apple doesn’t sell laptops with a touchscreen. Why? You suggested that it was because a touchscreen would threaten iPad sales.
I think that’s wrong and that the answer is simpler than that.
Apple doesn’t sell touchscreens because they want thin and light laptops. Touchscreens are heavy and thick. The math isn’t “adding a touchscreen will threaten iPad sales”. The math is “the market for a touchscreen laptop is smaller than the market for a super thin laptop”. Apple sells more laptops because they are super thin than they ever could if they added a touchscreen.
Why don’t they add a touchscreen as an option, you ask? Because they would need to have a different case to fit the touchscreen. And that would add more cost for not as much benefit.
Apple have multiple iPad lines and could easily limit a desktop class OS to the iPad Pro, a move I can almost guarantuee would alianate noone.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2024/04/17/app-store-is-profitable-apple....
I probably wouldn’t replace it if something happened to it. iPad OS feels like a toy compared to a Mac.
The only time I use my iPad over a laptop or something is for reading, watching videos or if I'm simply using it as a glorified ssh/rdp client to work on my other machines, but that's only if I want to consume media or read before I want to do anything else, which isn't often, and I don't generally put away my laptop to switch a tablet if the laptop can already do it.
Little things like the complete lack of multi-user support is why I don't ever hand it over to my kids or anything, they're insistent that it's a personal device and I find that unacceptable when they market it as a general computing replacement device that can't do something that has been available for decades everywhere else, even amongst their own products.. and that's without even going into having the ability to run software without Apple's blessing.. sideloading is not convenient and I've decided I'm no longer interested in buying a tablet or computer for myself that fights me on what software I can run on it.
Same here, but for me it goes both ways.
I think that is the main point of the article above, and also why so many people would want an iPad Pro to actually have Pro features [1].
[1]: Yes, I know about iPhone Pro, but at least iPhone Pro have some exclusive features that make sense for Pro users like USB 3.0 and ProRes camera features. However in the case of iPad Pro, what is actually the workflow that requires a better CPU? Final Cut? And that is it basically.
But not even that, you are limited to using JIT unless you have a jailbroken device (or outdated versions of iOS).
The fact that the iPad is a shitty development platform doesn't mean that it lacks pro features or people can't make use of the improvements to the CPU/GPU.
I have different nitpicks about any system I use; it doesn't disqualify it from being legitimately good for X task.
I think there is a difference between being "great" and "usable". I consider iPad usable for all those tasks, but to be great you actually need to offer more features to Pro users. Right now, the only Pro usage I think iPad are great is drawing, but in this case you can even get by with a first or second generation iPad Pro.
But maybe I am nitpicking, you are right that iPads are ok for some Pro users, but great would be too much.
It's not that it can't be made on PC; there's plenty of PCs with touch screens, but it's not.
It's also just very competent as a music making device in general. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass dealing with samples on iPadOS and iOS, which is why things like AudioShare [1] exist to help deal with the lackluster file management. But in most cases, you don't really need to touch that. There's a ton of great synthesizers, drum machines, and various different styles of music production groovebox/launchers/loopers/daws/mixers on it that just don't exist on other platforms. You can also use it to augment other platforms, through things like Logic Remote [2] or LK [3], which turns your iPad into a controller interface for Ableton Live.
It's not perfect, but neither is the Mac. or Linux or Windows or any other platform that is used for making music. I still think it's great, though.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audioshare/id543859300
[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/logic-remote/id638394624
[3] https://www.imaginando.pt/products/lk-ableton-live-and-midi-...
Lastly, do you think Apple shares your mantra of "If you want a [device] then get a [device]" when they developed the ability to run iOS/iPadOS apps on Apple Silicon Macs? iPads can run iOS apps too, why didn't Apple tell them to get an iOS device instead?
> Lastly, do you think Apple shares your mantra of "If you want a [device] then get a [device]" when they developed the ability to run iOS/iPadOS apps on Apple Silicon Macs? iPads can run iOS apps too, why didn't Apple tell them to get an iOS device instead?
One is a computer, it's natural to give it more features but not the reverse...
Things is, there's very few competent tablets: basically two or three makers on the Windows side, the Samsung Ultra tablets, Xiaomi, and the iPad Pro. And right now the future or the Surface Pro line is pretty dicy, so the iPad becoming more competent would be more than welcome.
To your point, there could be more differenciation between the "pro" line and the regular iPads.
The only pro thing that is being complained about here is programming but hey most people are not programmers. Don't let the HN echo chamber mislead you...
For instance iOS's process management model means your program gets suspended if it goes too long in the background. Let's say you want to write an email in fullscreen while exporting your superb 4K movie in the background, tough luck.
Idem if you want to have multiple programs running video content in parrallel (or even look at multiple videos at the same time. Short of using a dedicated app, the default ones won't help you)
The browser situation could get resolved as the EU has pressured Apple to do it, but there is still a lot of things that could get improved to help power users, even outside of our circles.
Isn't UTM working on iPad? Looks like it according to UTM web pages. What prevents anyone to run MacOS or any Linux distro as a fullscreen VM on iPadOS like it was a regular laptop?
Everyone who is going to have an iPhone or iPad already has one.
Do app sales (multitasking = new apps) generate 30% store fees?
Do device sales correlate with subscription sales?
Last I checked, Apple has:
Apple Pay
Apple Card
AppleCare+
AppleCare Help Desk Support
AppleCare OS Support
AppleCare for Enterprise
Apple Messages for Business (not sure if this one is paid or free)
Fitness+
Apple TV+
MLS Season Pass
iCloud+
Apple News+
Apple Music
Apple Arcade
iPhone Upgrade Program
Apple Developer Program
Apple Developer Enterprise Program
Apple One
...and there are probably a few more I’m missing.
I’m surprised they haven’t figured out a way to charge a monthly fee for iMessage and FaceTime yet (beyond of course the usual nagging you for iCloud storage upgrades to store backups all of the attachments you’ve been iMessaged).
There's an exciting story to tell about the iPad Pro being a hybrid tablet, a next gen Mac, the best of both worlds. Or they could do nothing, and let it remain a boring niche product with a really nice screen. We'll see.
That doesn't mean it won't happen this time, I certainly hope it does.
On iPad? Nope.
My view is that, fundamentally, a lot of "professional" workflows is just as much about shuffling data around as it is working on said data. Just as data science taught us that data cleaning is 80% of the job, the same applies to video editing, programming, etc. iPadOS is uniquely bad at moving data around due to its onerous requirements around sandboxing and its poor interfaces around inter-app communication, when these are precisely the things that are most needed.
And then there's the multitasking, which remains terrible to this day. Can they improve it? Definitely, but I wouldn't want to be the guy trying to figure out how to do it without ruining the normal user experience.
I would imagine support might not be 1:1 with all the features as Windows 11 might support, but probably good enough. It'd be a sacrifice I'd be willing to live with.
And then there's booting. You will probably have to monkey with secure boot, which means dual booting can be a pain. Big, popular distros are starting to support secure boot, so it might just work, but it might not. And I'd be kind of shocked if MS didn't take the opportunity to ditch legacy x86 baggage[1] to completely lock down boot and make it impossible to run anything but Windows.
In summary, on older Surface devices, yes you can run Linux but you have to pretend it's 20 years ago and Linux is still a pain to get running. On ARM? Good luck.
[0] basically all input methods. Touchpad, keyboard, touch, and pen.
[1] and the freedoms such baggage still carries
But, I don't like that ads are in the start menu, that I'm asked to try out Microsoft Edge, or that the built-in search checks the web rather than sticking to my PC.
There's a lot of small points of friction, and it seems that after every major update a new one is added, or my old preferences are ignored. For many of these settings, you need to go into less familiar tools like the group policy editor as opposed to the built-in Settings app.
It feels gross to have paid $200 for a Windows 11 Pro license to then be shoved ads.
Apple is just as bad, routinely having a notification offering me a trial of Apple Fitness even though there is no way I would ever buy that because there is no way I'm going to pay 10 euros a month to have workout planning to use an Apple Watch I already bought from them for a decent amount of money (devices in this price range have this type of stuff built-in).
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft gets a small pass for the nagging, because at least I didn't even spend a lot of money with them since I didn't buy my windows computer from them.
But Apple is a big no-no. No way you upsell me after selling me a deeply flawed device (partly because the software is an unfocused mess and lacking in many ways, partly because the hardware is not that good for the price).
Many pro apps have either plugins and/or interoperability with other apps/extensions on the desktop.
In iPad, even if you have the app (e.g. Logic, Resolve, FCP) it's very hard to create a "real" experience like the desktop with file/plugin interoperability or a true ecosystem. In addition, this is why we don't have any developer tools that'd actually be anything of a daily driver (rather a proof of concept).
If we get true multitasking/background tasks, then I believe many other pro apps will jump onboard.
The hardware is absolutely fantastic, the SoC is more than capable. We just need the software support.
> Apps don’t normally receive any extra execution time after they enter the background. However, UIKit does grant execution time to apps that support any of the following time-sensitive capabilities:
* Audio communication using AirPlay, or Picture in Picture video.
* Location-sensitive services for users.
* Voice over IP.
* Communication with an external accessory.
* Communication with Bluetooth LE accessories, or conversion of the device into a Bluetooth LE accessory.
* Regular updates from a server.
* Support for Apple Push Notification service (APNs).
> Enable the Background Modes capability in Xcode if your app supports background features.
Keeping an SSH session alive is barely outside of the existing use cases. Long-running export jobs and things like that would need a new use case defined, perhaps with QoS definitions.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_envi...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_envi...
The existing ones, while welcome, are not enough for many pro cases. The closest is inter-app audio, which was a good addition but perhaps not extensive enough.
Though for iPad to be truly "Pro", there needs to be adjustments made, perhaps through entitlements or some shared storage between apps (user-chosen apps, not necessarily from the same developer as that already exists) or something similar.
I feel that I actually want a locked down operating system on my phone where the privacy implications are just to high, but on a computer or tablet, I prefer the more open operating system and find the walled garden so limiting. You really can’t run python or code on it and it doesn’t offer the same apps that make the Mac so amazing like raycast, etc.
Example: I have Youtube installed on the i*device. I click on a Youtube link and it opens in a webview, but doesn't know who I am. I'm logged in via the app, and I'm logged in via Safari, but in the protected webview, it doesn't know. Sometimes it's easy to click on the "Open in App" link, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. If I try to login, then the system sends me to login via Google, which will then send me over to Gmail for MFA validation.
This can't be. It doesn't work like this on macOS. The security model is hell.
Rein them in please Apple.
Sometimes I'm logged in (I guess one of those web views got logged into at one point) and then I can watch a few seconds, manually open the app, go into history and restart it proper.
Not fun.
Another gripe I have is lack of keyboard shortcut consistency. MacOS apps are encouraged through the API and defaults to provide keyboard shortcuts for all actions. On iOS most Apps don't implement them at all. Gmail app is the worst example.
Copy paste is clumsy as well.
There are workarounds, e.g. live PiP window used by iPulse.
Apple don't manage pre- digital seniors well. With lots of emerging functional loss if not outright dementia, these devices are confusing.
I would love to talk to Apple UX about some of the inconsistency.
I still use my iPad (and I imagine the author does to) because there are things it does SO much better than a computer — even beyond consumption.
Using the Apple Pencil with apps like Notability, Procreate and Lightroom is IMHO so much better than the equivalent experience on desktop.
Notetaking on computers has been sorely lacking basically forever. Being able to quickly take notes, interspersed with sketches, arrows, and symbols, and layout the page exactly how I want — just how I’d do it in a physical notebook — is awesome.
https://estore.wacom.com/media/Global/Products/accessories/p...
I can use the pro pen 2 all day and not feel issues with my fingers or wrists. The apple pencil requires me to use some goofy silicone addons to make it ergonomically functional if you plan to use it for more than an hour. Plus those add ons get in the way of mounting the pencil magnetically, often get in the way of using the touch buttons, and limit what cases you might use.
This is the silicone add on I use, which ergonomically makes the apple pencil an actual functional tool that doesn't hurt hand/fingers/wrists.
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0C21XNJJC/
The apple pencil is a pretty 'ok' tool if all you're doing is the occasional sketch. The apple pencil + ipad is a nice drawing platform because its almost always the one you have with you.
It's not so much better than a dedicated drawing platform on computer - a proper wacom drawing display. But thats a dedicated device, and costs as much as an ipad, so you pay more for the better product + the computer.
Also, who is really the market for an ipad pro. The average consumer is going to want a cheap ipad model for media and game consumption on the go. Ipad pro is for creatives or tech enthusiasts with disposable income; in either scenario, owning both ipad and Macbook is fairly likely, and they do work well as complementary devices.
I'm still using a 2018 ipad pro. it has the modern design and modern keyboard and flies through everything. I use it to look at slack sometimes. It's pretty pointless to me as primarily a macbook user and I don't see any reason whatsoever to upgrade it.
I have a perfectly good Mac mini (32gb ram, intel based) but after I’ve updated the iOS on my iPhone the account stopped working on Mac mini. It says I need to upgrade the OS in order to use apple services(I.e iCloud, mail etc) but there is no OS upgrade option for the old Mac mini
Some features that require ARM processors don’t work; for instance, I can’t install or run iOS/iPadOS apps from the App Store, unfortunately, but I don’t really need to do that very badly.
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
Then you install Windows and figure out an Android phone will offer you the same type of integration, just in a less polished way. And you figure out you will save over 2K euros in a 10-years period and it will be much cooler to take some holidays (or whatever) instead of engrossing Apple shareholders.
Congrats, you found the get out of jail free card...
Apple deserves some blame for failing to maintain the drivers for legacy Intel hardware in modern macOS, which is what the OCLP software seeks to reimplement and restore, which is no small feat. The group maintaining the software deserves all the praise they get for doing what Apple doesn’t.
All that said, macOS on Apple hardware is the best native operating system experience today in my opinion. The trackpad alone remains the major differentiating factor, but the aluminum unibody construction is also a major plus. Running Linux on Apple hardware somehow makes the trackpad just as janky as running Windows on Apple hardware, and Windows trackpads are generally janky due to OEM hardware/drivers being garbage, so it seems that the issue is both hardware and driver related, as running macOS on non-Apple hardware also suffers from jankiness.
Windows and Android are not really suitable alternatives to Apple hardware. The build quality just isn’t the same, and there isn’t really anything like AppleCare or iCloud. Windows 11 is adding literal ads in the chrome. At least Android lets you sideload apps and ideally root your device. The EU is correctly rectifying that issue in iOS and iPadOS, but Apple is dragging their feet via malicious compliance and willful misinterpretation of DMA requirements.
Two thousand euros over a 10 year period is not really a bad price to pay for a device you use probably every day. That cheaper alternatives exist isn’t really the point, as the quality of alternatives isn’t at all comparable. I say this as someone who has professionally used, repaired, maintained, deployed, and trained people to use Windows, Macs, iOS/iPadOS, and Android for over 10 years. I use what suits the use case, budget, and preferences of individuals and groups to meet their needs, goals, and expectations.
But like the previous comment said you can use OCLP to install new versions of MacOS on "unsupported hardware". Usually you can go 2-3 versions of newer MacOS without any issue. Beyond that little things will start breaking, but it will still be functional.
I run the newest versions of Sonoma on a 2010 iMac (that I upgraded to a quad core CPU, Metal capable GPU, and 32GB of RAM), a 2012 Mac Pro 5,1 (also upgraded to dual 3.46GHZ CPUs, RX 580, and 64GB RAM), and a 2009 MacBook Pro (SSD, and RAM Upgraded).
There are versions of iOS on iPhone that can't do iCloud-stuff anymore.
All of that can be done on a non-pro device but I got the pro for the screen. Having a 13” screen with a high refresh rate is huge. Last year I asked the school to buy me an iPad because I didn’t like that I was using my personal device for professional use. But they bought a base model with a small 60hz screen. I find it completely unusable and haven’t touched it since I loaded my note taking software on it. Now it’s a glorified timer for exams.
Caring about someone else’s platform - especially when you care about it more than the people who have control over it - is not where you want to be.
iPad has gotten better compared to the early days but still remains a device designed around consuming content. It is great at consuming content, books, movies, comics, reading headlines .. etc.
My two cents.
>First, as I’ve said multiple times, I love my iPad and want the platform to get better. If you care about something or someone, sometimes you have to tell them what’s wrong in order to improve and find a new path forward. I hope this story can serve as a reference for those with the power to steer iPadOS in a different direction in the future.
Then goes on to list a million reasons that it sucks, and has sucked for the last 12 years!
But Apple isn't a dictator and you don't have to stay with them.
If it doesn't do what you want, buy what does.
Or just don't buy a product that you know won't do what you want.
As an aside, both my Android phone from 5 years ago, and my Android tablet, do everything that he complains about his expensive ipad not doing (the only thing I'm not sure about is recording Skype calls).
Waiting for a hardware competitor that can run standard Linux. Hopefully ex-Apple Nuvia/Oryon delivers at Computex next week.
Is it possible that there could be a standard linux (fanless) tablet?
Pricing is an open question, but even if the initial devices are "premium" due to post-IPO Arm licensing tax on Qualcomm, competition between multiple PC vendors and Apple will be good for everyone
In a year or two, hopefully that means Framework Arm devices with power and performance >= early Apple Silicon devices.
All of the Intel based offerings are utter crap for battery life.
Plenty of commercial factors that the community isn't willing to compromise on, hence we only get those products that only kind of work, for tech savy communities.
Microsoft surface is an excellent piece of hardware that can run linux just fine
If you want an iPad, only Apple sells them. If you want a tablet (a different class of device that is nowhere near as useful or high quality as an iPad) then yes, you can buy them from other manufacturers.
Nobody but nobody is making hardware on the level of the current iPhones, iPads, and Macbooks. It’s not even remotely close. I bought a top of the line Dell “ultrabook” not long ago and half of the functionality felt like I had traveled back in time to the 90s.
Lol, the gatekeeping of your post to say the iPad is not a tablet.
All I want in a tablet is a nice screen, fast CPU, and quick switching between apps.
I want those things OP complained about in the article to work (background apps/multitasking/background audio etc).
For me the tablet is a media consumption device. I write notes in Obsidian a tiny bit, but I want a keyboard to do any real work. I can use a bluetooth keyboard if I want.
I have no complaints about my tablet now. It even has a headphone jack.
I can put youtube (revanced, adblocked and sponsorblocked) on a split screen with reddit below.
I can use Firefox with adblock.
I can ssh and vnc to my servers.
I auto-sync files with my own servers using Syncthing.
iPad can't do those things.
What magic features does an iPad have? A pen? The absolute worst input method imaginable.
I had a pen on my OG Samsung Galaxy Note from 2011, and I never used it. Also on the Note 3, also never used that, because Pens suck.
More cameras I won't use? No thanks. I have very good cameras on my phone that is always with me, and a dedicated mirrorless for when I care to take really good photos.
I recognize that I'm obviously not the target market for iPad Pro - I don't want to hold a screen that big while sitting on the couch.
But from reading your post, the market for iPad Pro appears to be people ignorant enough to be deluded that it's so different and somehow "better quality" than any other tablet.
Then you read the actual article to see exactly how deluded they are.
IpadOS sounds like a shit show.
Literally the only thing Apple has that I am somewhat jealous of is battery efficiency of the fanless macbooks.
I want a fanless laptop (am I even permitted to call a macbook a laptop when it's so clearly superior to your Dell laptop? lol), but I won't suffer Apple to get one.
I don't even use my laptop except if I take it when I go away on holidays. But it's not in any way lower quality than macbooks.
Linux/Windows laptops should be fanless soon I hope.
The only quality Apple has over other manufacturers is the quality of their marketing.
> What magic features does an iPad have?
> I am somewhat jealous of is battery efficiency of the fanless macbooks.
I want good battery efficiency on my tablets as well, and I doubt any Android tablet could match that. It's a tablet for god's sake, the whole point is to not have to tether it to a power outlet for any prolonged duration of work.
I use mine on and off through the day, about half an hour at lunch time, and for a few hours continuously each night.
I charge mine when it gets below 50% so usually every second day. It's really not a burden.
Battery life of Android tablets is fine.
Likely not as good as an iPad in that regard, but an iPad can't do the things I want to do, so there's that.
Horses of all colours are still horses, yet you use this statement to explain why iPads are not tablets?
Regarding pain, not only do Apple largely ignore the device, but accessory manufacturers seem to follow suit. I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to buy a must-have accessory without success. I'm hoping that Apple won't be killing it off any time soon- I'd hate to have to over to the dark side...
So considering that new phones aren’t always faster than the old ones where it actually counts (the ux), how are these newer gen ipads fairing? Do they actually feel like upgrades?
We can debate origin stories and mythology, but no one (yet?) has the creative power to change the ancient artifact.
Meanwhile, it adorns inadvertent museums.
This is EXACTLY how I feel. WWDC will roll around and Apple will completely drop the ball for yet another year with iPadOS.
I also feel that the iPad Pro is one of the best hardware form factors for a computer — but iPadOS makes it a not great laptop replacement. I can’t help but feel like it would look incredibly foolish for Apple to do their May iPad event announcing M4 iPads — only to find out at WWDC that iPadOS still sucks.
Thankfully, it seems like most people, tech reviewers, etc. are vocal about iPadOS missing the mark. I hope Apple doesn’t continue to ignore the negative feedback.
But I'll probably never buy another. The OS is just too limiting.
Perhaps they'll eventually decide to let them run MacOS? (Seems like a no-brainer, at least when a keyboard case is in-use, but apparently not.)
I've a short list of tasks:
Apple TV: for task "watch Apple TV+"
Safari: for task "surf internet"
Google Maps: for task "surf geography"
Animoog Z: for task "make music"
While for sure I would love ipadOS to be a real OS, as long as it's the best device for even one task that I do regularly, I'll probably keep buying new ipads - but generally only once every four years, as I get my boost for my tasks from new hardware.
They just need to let you run MacOS on it in a VM and all will be right with the world.
But they won't because they are greedy selfish bastards that do not actually have the user at heart.
End of discussion
The ipads now have zero reason not to allow virtual machines beyond greed.
when riding a bus in singapore, or flying short-distance, i feel awkward using my macbook. whereas if i use an ipad, i feel like it's more appropriate. this is just a personal preference though.
another thing i'd love for ipads to have is, allowing its display to be used as an external monitor.
I’d even pay a software unlock for it. It’s the perfect convergence device if only Apple would let it be.
Reinstate the Hypervisor API that was banished in 16.3.1.
But I already gave up on it especially after the recent comments from Apple as they want people to buy both devices to 'complement' each other: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/05/13/apple-vp-mac-ipad-compl...
I own an M1 iPad Pro but 80% of the time I use it as a sidecar due to how limited it is.
I just don't get the obsession some people have for the iPad, jumping through hoops and putting up with so many compromises when most issues are solved using a laptop. Can someone explain this? I have an iPad but I primarily use it for watching films, I wouldn't dream of trying to get any work done on it when I have a Macbook.
[Citation needed]
I don't buy this argument. And I also don't buy that iPadOS is "kneecapped". They're different operating systems for different uses. I'd hate for macOS to gain touch support, since it would ruin it for mouse and keyboard usage, just as happened to Windows, Gnome, and other desktop UIs.
It wouldn't be able to distinguish between a Close or Minimise action on every single titlebar.
It makes no sense.
The basic kindergarten math that having your customers need to buy an iPad plus a MacBook to have their needs covered, instead of just an iPad with more power-user features or just a MacBook with a touchscreen, equals more profits for them.
Do you really need a citation that Apple would much rather make more money rather than less?
Users buying an 1TB iPad Pro with keyboard, AND, a MacBook Pro to do the things the iPad can't do even though it has the same CPU.
Cha-ching!
To compel families to more iPads.
Can you really look at the Final Cut Pro example given in the article and say, yes, this is the smooth user experience that Apple is aiming for?
In some senses, yeah, it’s amazing. But I use the f keys all the time normally. I use esc all the time. The keyboard lacks both. It makes the iPad heavier than my laptop, ruins the pick up and use character; the pencil goes flying if you’re not really careful when carrying it; and you still can’t use it in many circumstances on the couch because of the weight balancing and you have to cradle it.
It stops it from being a tablet and turns it into an un-ergonomic laptop
I'd rather use a Chromebook (though, not the cheapest ones) so that there's guaranteed web app compatibility. And I've still got an App Store to do my taxes (or whatever people use their iPads for, I dunno)
Can this ageist bullshit just die already? Hating on a whole generation is just fucking stupid.
Okay, let's add background task processing, hungrier apps like Xcode, more simultaneous apps. I guess we'll need more memory and compute resources, and so therefore we'll need more battery, too.
So now I have a 2 lb iPad that doesn't have enough internal space to cool itself. Great. Thanks internet.
> You introduce the last processor on a iPad?
It makes sense since iPad is refreshed less often. Other M4 hardware is right around the corner.
Calling a spade a spade is actually a much-needed improvement in today's landscape.
Depends pretty much on the region.