I remember discovering iPad split screen more than a year into owning one. It was like magic, then I didn't know what I had done to invoke it. I started trying random stuff looking for the incantations and eventually gave up and Googled it.
I’d say the iPad is the symbol of everything wrong with consumer computing devices, I really hate it. The most upsetting thing is that I’m not sure that’s true, look at the cheap Windows PCs and Android phones: they’re full frontal active assaults on the users! It’s all terrible!
Text selection is the most broken thing to me on an ipad. It makes any kind of editing pretty much unusable. Great device to browse the web from my bathtub and watch movies on a plane, but haven’t found any other usage.
I just learned the spacebar trick a few months ago.
I still get “5e” instead of “the” about twice a month. And once in a while I will be typing and four words to half a sentence will just disappear and I still have no idea how I’m doing that.
A whole new text entry system wouldn’t go amiss for me, either.
For me, a chunk of text would go missing because it interprets fast typing as double, triple, quadruple tapping. Which means the text is selected and then promptly overwritten. The solution is to be deliberate about typing slowly on the screen keyboard.
https://www.howtogeek.com/441872/how-to-use-text-editing-ges...
It would be nice if they fixed the autocorrect learning insane things like correcting “male” to “Male” and “doesn’t” to “DOESNT”, so I wouldn’t have to do so much text selection to fix it. My iPhone which is really behind on iOS versions doesn’t do this but my iPad is awful for it.
Autocorrect on the iOS from four years ago was nothing short of magic. It would understand the most confused babble and rarely needed any guidance. It even seemed to get used to my style of typing after a while. Today, it is a constant battle. It keeps trying to rope in my address book, different languages I’m not typing in, and arcane words. I correct it every four sentences at least.
I thought I wanted these features; boy was I wrong.
This has been such a pet hate for years on systems with a mouse as well as iPhone iOS, that I assume it is nigh impossible to select text reliably and conveniently, for some unexplored reason or other. It's always the case that I can get a selection backwards up to the first letter but missing it, or including the first letter and some extra junk from the lines before, but not simply up to and including the first letter.
Right now replying to your comment on Windows, FireFox, with a mouse, I have just discovered a new text selection mode I've never noticed before[1] - double-click-and-drag selects whole words. Consistently up to the new word boundary on the right. That means it's possible to select an entire sentence up to (but without) the period. Or including the period and a trailing space. But not the obvious one to want - a sentence including the period and no trailing space.
[1] I know double-click commonly selects words, and triple-click selects sentences, but didn't know of double-click-drag.
Agreed — moving the cursor and selecting text has become almost unusable for me on iOS 13 [1]. It's a shame, because I always used to be impressed at how easy and natural it felt. I really hope they figure this out and reinstate the old approach.
This could actually be a valid reason to jailbreak my iPhone (the last time I did so was 10 years ago). Does anyone know if there are any tweaks that would bring back the old pre-iOS13 behaviour?
My favorite pet peeve is trying to edit URLs in the address bar in Safari. Just trying to get the cursor to the end of the address field a an error prone chore. Often the text is select and there’s no way to unselect it. Then of course it doesn’t help when you want to remove some components of the URL that Safari helpfully autocompletes back to the URL you jus visited.
Force touching on the keyboard gives your finger control over the cursor more like a touch pad on a computer. It works really well on the iPhone, not sure if it's available on iPad. But yet again, one of those feature you just have to know about to use.
Yep, for all the pride they take in the "it just works" and their "simpler" UI, they certainly love to hide useful features and just not tell you about them upfront.
Yeah, you can read and play around with the phone to learn but something simple like cursor and text adjustment should be priority no. 1 in terms of alerting the user that a function actually exists.
It doesn't work well either. If the cursor is already selecting a span of text it can be hard to return it to a single movable cursor and the two finger drag on spacebar thing will just move around the multiselection in a broken way. There is probably some other secret shortcut to toggle, tapping in the text or double tapping just seems to do things at random and rarely gives back a single cursor.
I am actually kind of annoyed they removed the force touch on newer iphones. I used it so often on my keyboard.
The tradeoff was a 4-hour longer battery so there was probably more gained than lost there but the usable area to move the cursor shrunk considerably (to a long touch on the spacebar only) and makes it harder to use.
Doesn’t work on an iPad, which is where I want the feature the most. Also, force touch is no fine in newer model phones (because they screwed up the implementation in my opinion).
The same thing works on an iPad or phones without Force Touch, you just need to start the gesture from the space bar. Long-press the space bar and now you can move the cursor anywhere by dragging.
Yes, hidden and undiscoverable gestures are a problem.
This is one of the reasons I don't understand why there are so many iPhone/iOS fanboys... are they actually never experiencing these kind of frustrating bits of iOS or are they just ignoring them? Because I experience them all the time. Only reason I haven't switched back to Android (yet) is that I love the form factor of the iPhone SE.
I felt this rather acutely at work where I was strongarmed into giving up my Linux desktop for a MacBook. When I ask how a Mac-loving coworker solved a OS problem, I'm met with blank stares as if they've never recognized it as a drawback, let alone wished for a solution. Multi-monitor support is a particular pain point for me; there just seems to be so much missing and I can't understand why.
I'm using multi-monitor (3 monitors) setup with my Mac for a long period of time (more than 5 years). What problems do you encounter, maybe I can help you to solve them.
iPads have complete market dominance in the world of the kiddies. I can't believe how many there are - big iPads in big cases, young children playing with some game or watching YouTube Kids. I don't think it's the market Apple invisioned, but it's a hugely successful one regardless.
I think judging the iPad based on changes they make for power users is near pointless in terms of its success.
I wasn't really responding directly to the blog, more the title and the discussion I expected it to bring. Doing that was probably not the best idea in hindsight, I just see people judging products like the iPad as if their success relies specifically on the demographic they exist in
I use them for real work. Taking notes (the split windows view is awesome for this - notes app in one window and the book in the other), reading, creating illustrations and other artwork, etc. I don't think they are a toy at all. I have a desktop computer and a couple of high end laptops, but I still reach for the ipad most often.
I have a very different take. I am much faster with a keyboard and keyboard shortcuts, and I hate glossy screens. Every time I use an Ipad this brings my productivity down compared to having an actual laptop. Honestly I cannot say I have seen people do real work on an Ipad. Just browsing and very short messages.
>By 1994 almost all graphic designers and illustrators were using computers for work.
The iPad is a great device but, it isn't essential to anything or anyone. If tomorrow there where no iPads anymore, we would all just get on with our lives.
ipads have a non-insignificant footprint as point of sales systems these days too, so I wouldn't say ipads are _only_ a consumption device. They are also a pretty solid task specific unit for certain specific industries.
I guess what OP was trying to say is that their application as creative tools (production vs consumption) is far more limited than the full fledged PC systems that we are used to.
In my experience that has more to do with the artificial limitations devs put into ipad software. Take MPC drum machines for example. iMPC Pro 2 could replace all hardware MPCs if they wanted to but they would cannibalize their hardware if they did that so they made the ipad version a toy instead.
For graphic design (typography work, layout, UI, etc) mouse and keyboard are still the best input devices. Much faster and precise than tapping on a touch screen or using an Apple Pencil.
This is unfortunatelly very true - Ipads have the best oen latency from mobile tablet devices & good software ecosystem (Procreate, etc.), likely thanks to overall more $$$ in iOS software development.
There are Android tablets with precise pen support, but especually the cheaper ones don't have that good pen precision (jitter, lag) and also the available drawing software is not as advanced as on the iPad & powerful ossdesktop drawig tools such as Krita or Mypaint are not yet ported to Android.
So in the end I basically had to get the top of the line Android tablet (Galaxy Tab S6) to get something comparable, where the manufacturer dumped so much mone so that some got also to the pen support & it would be working correctly. And so far so good. :)
Function keys seem like a stretch for the use case it is designed for - being able to type online or in apps while also having a very compact form factor.
Honestly I think companies are (mostly) wasting their money porting desktop software to iPads. There's going to be niches where it makes perfect sense, but Office for the iPad is going to be a waste of money. Home users don't need it, business have laptops and desktop for those things, and Word is a poor note taking app of field work. To be fair I believe that the iPad is a poor note taking platform in general.
For specialized software, tailored to specific fields, with only the interaction elements for particular jobs the iPad can be a much better fit than a laptop. Those jobs however aren't generic enough that off shelf software make a ton of sense.
Doesn't really matter what you personally think, what matters is what companies think, because they have the data to back it up. Is it a waste of money or not? Office for iPad came in 2014 and still being quite actively developed so I think we can conclude the opposite of what you are saying.
The Zune was launched in 2006 and discontinued in 2012. Why did that product last 6 years?
I’m not saying Office for iPad is pointless (I use it regularly, so quite the opposite!), but I do think it’s foolish to think an organisation the size of Microsoft’s doesn’t necessarily do things for obvious reasons. Individual incentives do not always lend themselves to data driven objectives.
I think it's unlikely that Office for iPad is a billion dollar investment either. It doesn't change that it might not actually generate any direct returns for them.
Loss-making strategies can ultimately be profitable in a broader sense (if it increases the stickiness of the product on it's primary platforms, keeping away competitors, a strategic moat).
I don't think there's any evidence either way to be able to make any assumptions about the level of interest of the product, and whether or not that justifies it's existence.
Seeing that the only way that Microsoft makes money on Office for iPad is by selling O365 subscriptions -- same as Adobe with Creative Cloud -- having access anywhere is the value add.
Not sure about Office, but iPad with Pencil seems popular with creative professionals, so for Adobe not to support it would open up opportunities to other software companies to Innovator's Dilemma them.
Software developers continuing, after all these years, to dismiss any kind of creative work with a computer that isn’t typing, is crazy. I’d take an iPad over a laptop or desktop computer for lots of creative work, if I could only have one device.
That's not quite true - iPads are a huge hit in electronic music for performance and production. Whether that counts as 'revolutionary' is another matter - there was the original Lemur which proved the multitouch MIDI use in principle - but it has created a new software niche market that genuinely is thriving and used for 'proper work'.
If all of them disappeared into thin air one night then nearly the entire global aviation system would come to a screeching halt. It’s the device of choice among air carriers for navigation charts. Paper backup isn’t even carried anymore. We just carry extra iPads and batteries.
I’m not sure any of the charting apps used by air carriers are even available on another OS at this point. I’ve never been aware of JeppFD Pro on Android and I believe they dumped Windows as well.
There are other options of course but as far as I’m aware in the US it’s all iPads and JeppFD Pro. The feds are familiar with it and a regulatory framework is created around it so it’s the path of least resistance. And as a pilot, I’d say most of us are pretty satisfied with it.
They tell you to switch off the device's broadcast functionality ("airplane mode"). Something they don't need for navigating with an iPad as it's just offline maps / apps).
While it's good to avoid EM interference from electronic devices, I think the real reason they want you to switch of these devices is to make sure you're not totally distracted during take-off or landing, and that you're not using headphones, so you'll be aware in case of accidents/emergencies.
Nah, they haven't asked passengers to turn off devices in years. They just want them placed on airplane mode so they're not connecting to cellular networks. Bluetooth and WiFi are just fine.
I haven't had a captain tell me to turn off electronic devices for years. The flight attendant asks me to remove headphones for the safety briefing, which is reasonable, and we're told to put it into airplane mode for takeoff/landing
I accidentally left my iPad in the seat-back on a recent flight — my case, it turns out, is a perfect match for Delta-leather-blue. Even though this is an iPad with cellular, I'd switched it to airplane mode and thus was unable to locate it with "Find My". After three days the airline hadn't found it, and I chalked it up to an expensive lesson learned.
On day four, I received a push message (from Find My) that the iPad had come to life. An airport staffer had found it and charged it up. Presumably it cold boots with airplane mode switched off, so it connected to the cellular network, received the "lost device" command, displayed my contact info, etc. I received a call shortly thereafter.
When I picked up the iPad at baggage services, I chatted with the staff a bit. They let me in on the "secret" that most airline employees never switch their devices into airplane mode anymore, and for this exact reason.
The pilots’ devices are selected to airplane mode as well. Many carriers do allow WiFi to be turned on and have a separate WiFi network onboard that allows for operational access. Mainly weather.
Why couldn't you put the app on an iPhone or iPod touch ? Or in a simulator on MAC ? It's not like the device is essential. It might be more practical for some purposes, but not essential.
Because of the form factor. iPad is close in size to the papers used before. iPhone is way too small and a Mac is way too big and clumsy. Also a Mac has a clamshell design as opposed to being just a tablet that fits nicely in front of the pilot.
not just pilots, I see them in use by nearly every service person who comes to the house and even at work. they are just the right size for easy reading, the lack of keyboard removes a major breaking point if not cleanliness issues. throw in they just give a modern and sleek vibe to any organization employing them versus pen and paper.
plus they make it easy for customers to sign for services which in turn makes it easier for businesses to know that the work was done. toss in CC readers that attach easily and you have a simple POS device
if anything the amount of waste that would come back into our lives without them would be staggering
”throw in they just give a modern and sleek vibe to any organization employing them versus pen and paper”
There likely is a good cost saving there, removing the need to transcribe handwritten forms and archive them in cases where the customers signed them.
It also easily gives you some tracking info, even if you only let it send location info when the service person uses it. That can give you the data to inform other customers on that service person’s route about arrival times.
The iPad is also a massive choice for artists who used to buy wacom products. The ability to buy an iPad and pencil for under $500 and make stuff in pretty great software really changed the industry. To do something like that with a computer was a $1000+ market.
That's not true. It's used as mapping and/or communications device in many trains and aircraft. Also many business representatives use it to do demos or just to keep the CRM updated. I am using it to sketch software architecture during meetings (on the projector).
As a daily user of iPad Pro 11” it would be very difficult to adjust back. Sure, the device does not provide me the comfort of doing 100% of my tasks at all times.
The combination of portability (form factor, battery life, LTE modem), with the growing support for the apps. I’m yet to see device that would replace it for me. I have had to take my MBP with me for quite some time.
iPad essentially fuels my remote-first work style.
> The iPad is a great device but, it isn't essential to anything or anyone.
This would only be said by someone who isn't a frontline worker no interacts with any. Unless you see the people who use tablets for work as not really working.
I would agree that the iPad isn't essential for home users, other than as a YouTube player for kids and a gaming device for old ladies.
It does however seem to have found it's way into various trades as an information device. For instance is has replaced laptop as the primary device in elder care in many cities in Denmark. It makes perfect sense to use an iPad, it's more portable, the limited interface forces developer to think hard about what input is really required, and it faster to"unlock" than a laptop.
The iPad has develop very quickly from a consumer device to an "Enterprise" solution. You basically only need it, if you can afford to have custom applications developed. For almost everyone else, there's the large screen iPhones.
Apple isn't going to tell us, but it would be interesting to learn how many iPads are going to customers, and how many to companies and governments.
Now hang on, I use the ipad for creating artwork and it is much much better than any desktop/laptop computer with a wacom (or whatever brand) tablet.
Also, they are tremendous for the elderly. My 97 year old grandmother really struggles with desktop/laptop computers, but has absolutely no trouble using her iPad. It's the main way she stays in touch with her family.
> How would anyone ever figure out how to split-screen multitask on the iPad if they didn’t already know how to do it?
I actually recently got my first personal iOS (okay, iPadOS) device and this is how I feel about many of the UI features. Touching some side of the screen triggers this or that surprising feature and I'm struggling to undo what I did to get back to the business. Maybe what's needed is good old RTFM, but having heard how easy Apple device are to supposed to be to use, it's kind of unexpected that so much of this stuff is not that discoverable.
They even did this silly "corner thing" in the server edition, Windows Server 2012 - I remember the first time I RDP'd onto one, and had no clue how to open the start menu (the Windows key didn't work over RDP)!
I had to google it, obviously whilst cursing profusely the whole time. Microsoft have a lot of UI/UX people - it boggles the mind that someone thought this was a good idea!
I legit had to google how to Shut down / Restart a Windows 8 machine back then! It's insane to think that tech people could not figure out the UI, imagine what the regular people had to go through.
Not sure why the downvote. This was a legitimate concern. I supported Windows PCs back then, and it was hard enough getting people distilled in the mantra of shutting down their PCs without just pulling the power. And then the default behaviour changes. Inconsistent UIs. https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-change-the-start-menu-power-...
In Gnome-Shell, pointing to the top-left corner of the screen (labeled "Activities" on the system bar) will bring up their Windows-8-screen equivalent, and it's quite intuitive to use once you know the basics. It's slow as hell because Javascript, but other than that it works fine. And yes, you can tap or swipe from outside for pure touch access.
The key distinction there is that there is a visual element that does still respond to taps/clicks, which means that eventually you try to click on it, overshoot to the corner, and discover that you don't need to click at all.
Gnome shell does some of this stuff well, but try using it for real work on a tablet and you start needing those arbitrary gestures again. Need to invoke the on screen keyboard? View the app overview? You're going to be searching the web for those gestures, guaranteed.
It's not a surprise to me that there's a manual and that it's even on the device :). But it seems like an iOS design pattern to keep this stuff hidden. I think it's okay for things that rarely happen by accident (multi-finger swipes or so), but touching (swiping?) over screen edges is something I seem to do often, so it becomes a problem. And I'm a geek in my early thirties, so it's not only a problem for the elderly!
I miss the time when there was no "Tips.app" nor a need for such an app. Nearly every UI feature used to be discoverable and made sense. Those that didn't (like gestures to close apps on iPad) were gated by a toggle in Settings so that casual users who don't know/need it don't accidentally trigger it.
Last year I got an iPad, my first Apple device (I needed ForeFlight for flying, and it's only available for iPad). I downloaded a few manuals for ForeFlight, which apparently went to Books. I pulled one up in Books, spent a few minutes glancing and things, and spent the next 15 minutes trying to figure out how to get out of the current book back to my list of books. Finally took it to my wife (a long-time Apple fan), and it took her about 3 minutes of tapping and dragging various places. In the end, neither of us knew how we did it.
There’s a gesture for it now, too... but I have no idea what it is. Something like swiping three or four fingers down or across or diagonally. Definitely not discoverable.
> Many apps allow people to shake the device to undo and redo certain operations, such as typing or deleting. When initiated in this manner, an alert asks the user to confirm or cancel the undo or redo operation.
This was replaced in iOS 13 by a less comical, yet equally undiscoverable three-finger tap gesture.
Considering that command-Z is not discoverable either, it’s not too bad, especially as there are undo/redo/clipboard buttons on the keyboard in most cases.
Ever time you manually click edit → undo, you'll see the shortcut. It’s not invasive—it’s not some big popup that takes over the screen, or even a neon-colored tooltip that commands your attention—it’s just there, in the background, in case you happen to notice it. Maybe you’re not sure what it means at first, but if you keep seeing it every day, you just might try hitting the sequence of keys at some point...
The best UIs naturally help you progress from a basic user to an advanced user, without you even noticing it. I'm not saying the traditional desktop UI paradigm is the best that can ever possibly be done, but it has had 30 years of evolution at this point, and it's pretty darn strong.
I really miss the consistency of CUA and its derivatives (the original Mac and Windows desktop UX). It may have not been the most ergonomic, but it was extremely discoverable thanks to the menus, and it was very consistent: you only had to learn a few simple principles, and then apply them everywhere - and it scaled nicely from Notepad to Excel.
> having heard how easy Apple device are to supposed to be to use
That was a rule for very good reason, and it will take some time to erode, but it’s definitely not as true today as it once was. It’s no consolation, but the first iPad - from the era of usable Apple design - was much better. Not in terms of power or weight, of course, but the OS didn’t have all these weird mystery-meat controls, gestures, broken multi-windowing etc.
Is multi-windowing really broken? I've found it incredibly useful for taking notes in the right window while the book/article I am reading in in the left window. It seems to just work for me.
It’s changed. With the last iOS update, the gestures changed slightly - they used to start with a slide over that could be docked, and moved to a split and/or dock based on the position on the screen.
Individual app’s capabilities also vary based on whether they are windowed or not. For example, you can’t airplay out of YouTube unless the app is full screen (even though once you’ve moved it to your Apple TV, you can switch away freely).
Discoverability is also crap. You have to dig into the manual (which you have to “buy” for free) to get the full details of the feature.
Swiping is not discoverable, but no one noticed at first because the iPhone TV ad campaigns all showed how to use it. So most people who got an iPhone already had that bit of knowledge in their brains and thought it was intuitive.
Touch interfaces have an inherent disadvantage here — there's no equivalent of 'hovering' a 'cursor' over something to see if it changes visually, triggers a tooltip, etc. Their interfaces actually need more help to be discoverable, not less.
Swiping isn't even a great gesture for most uses. Earlier today, I had to delete maybe 50-100 downloaded podcasts from the Podcasts app (there is seemingly no way to do this en masse). The quickest way to do so is with repeated swipes, but it's almost impossible to be consistent with your swipes over 50-100 items: sometimes the swipes 'stop short', sometimes they just fail for no obvious reason. A swipe is also a LOT more physical effort than a tap — if I could have just pressed a "DELETE" button 50 times, it would have been a lot more palatable (still short of a proper multi-delete, of course).
You’re missing the iPad business model. You’re not allowed to do anything (except maybe wash the dishes or get dressed) when the iPad is showing an ad that gets you free something.
True multitasking would break the business model of thousands of sites.
The iPad could have been a new Dynabook. Alan Kay was actually fairly impressed with it when it came out. Unfortunately I agree with Gruber, it has really failed to live up to expectations. Missing a hardware keyboard is quite a big deal I think.
Oh grief no, an integrated hardware keyboard would kill everything that is great about the iPad. We have compact mobile devices with keyboards already, they're called laptops.
This is a very good take on the subject. I love the iPad, I use it all the time. It's an unbelievably good piece of hardware with a number of really good software applications. It is a surprisingly good thinking and note-taking tool, it's the best tool (period) for reading datasheets (or any large PDF documents), it is a great music workstation if you connect a MIDI keyboard and/or an external USB audio interface. But it is so sadly limited by the user interface and artificial restrictions that Apple places on the OS.
The worst thing is that the forced over-simplification of the UI features did not make it easier to use for beginners. I can see many people (including myself) struggling. So we have been forced into a "compromise" with all the downside, but none of the upside.
Given how great the hardware is (really, I think this is under-appreciated), I really hope Apple can get out of that thinking rut.
I also think that the slow iPad sales are directly connected to the mediocre OS software.
Spot on. I've been using an iPad Pro for 3 years now I use it every day and I love it but I still can't reliably get two apps to sit side-by side on the screen.
I just got an iPad Pro and I agree this gesture is awkward. Plus, some apps seem to not support it at all, so it’ll silently fail when one of those apps is on either side.
Maybe if I used the feature more. But the only time I use it is with a somewhat older large iPad that I sometimes use for drawing but which mostly sits in my kitchen to display recipes. I can never remember the right incantations when I try to do the split screen thing. And don't even try on the smaller iPad I use day to day.
> The worst thing is that the forced over-simplification of the UI features did not make it easier to use for beginners.
I believe Gruber argues completely the opposite: that the recent changes to add features like split screen make it more confusing (e.g. the example of his mother getting stuck in the split screen and calling him). He continues in the very article we comment here (emphasis mine):
"if I could go back to the pre-split-screen, pre-drag-and-drop interface I would. Which is to say, now that iPadOS has its own name, I wish I could install the iPhone’s one-app-on-screen-at-a-time, no-drag-and-drop iOS on my iPad Pro. I’d do it in a heartbeat and be much happier for it."
And I think that should be a configurable accessibility option: to have UI completely discoverable and non-stuckable, even if some "so-called-Pro" features need more steps (or can't be implemented). Or even better and safer: that should be the default, with "advanced" shortcuts as an opt-in option.
The interface should by default to never bring users to the point where they can remain "stuck" in some mode from which they can't get out.
Steve Jobs understood that that 100% "discoverability" and "non stuckiness" must be the default UI, that's why Gruber would like to switch back to that older ideal.
And Steve Jobs was old enough to learn that much earlier: that the "modes" are bad and that good UI doesn't require one to do some magic to switch between them, as it can be summarized in the joke: "How to Quit Vim and Exit the VI Editor — the most popular Stack Overflow question -- and I'm using vi last two years because I can't figure out how to exit it."
Even these "visual" UI changes that made the UI more "Ive-conform" (removing buttons and having only text) made the UI more confusing for anybody not trained and retrained. The back "button" in the apps was drawn as a button when Jobs controlled the UI. Then it got to be switched to just the < sign, which those who don't frequently use the UI never understand to be anything more than a meaningless symbol on the screen.
> And Steve Jobs was old enough to learn that much earlier: that the "modes" are bad and that good UI doesn't require one to do some magic to switch between them, as it can be summarized in the joke: "How to Quit Vim and Exit the VI Editor — the most popular Stack Overflow question -- and I'm using vi last two years because I can't figure out how to exit it."
The more a software do, the less it's user friendly... You can't really compare Vi, a text editor that need training to master by technician, and the IpadOS. They are not made for the same people.
I think that is different from being “user friendly”, where “user friendly” means “the UI for this application is as intuitive as we could make it do that a wide range of nontechnical users are able to comfortably use this application with a minimum of formal instruction.”
+1 I still haven’t figured out how to get split screen reliably and every time. But I don’t find a need for split screen either. A few times, I tried I had to google how to get split screen then I gave up. Also, sometime I automagically get split screen and can’t figure out how to get rid of it. Usually land up just closing apps in split screen and restarting apps.
I love and use split screen all the time on my iPad for a variety of use cases. Even though I love the feature and find it really useful all of the UI constraints related to it are totally true. I would never want the feature removed, but the existing UI for it is beyond maddening.
- drawing in Procreate with reference material in the split.
- learning a song by singing + playing it on the guitar with chords and lyrics displayed, with it playing in Music† at the same time (on repeat + seek readily accessible)††
† I find it infuriating that no other music app than Music has considered split a possibility.
†† I'm aware there's a "Play" thing in Ultimate Guitar but it's absolute crap, playing a YouTube version that often doesn't match, obscures the sheet with a PIP, and is terrible to make repeat/seek. This is a perfect use case of functional composability using split screen.
I use my iPad Pro in splitscreen almost exclusively. Probably because I mainly use it for notetaking and research, instead of as just an entertainment device. That said, the usability of multitasking has for some reason become far worse on iPads since iOS 11 and I'm still waiting for them to do anything to improve it. I still can't believe it's in the state it is now, years later.
I think if you find a compelling use case for it, you will figure it out :-)
I scan physical books to PDFs and read them as Quicklook from Files. Now, these books sometimes refer to other parts within the same book. So I almost always split the same book into 75:25 split. The smaller section section to move between the book/chapters, the larger section for focusing on.
I find this almost TWMish way of windowing actually helps me focus better than on the full MacOS.
Another use case. I write code on iPad(yes... I do), no.. not production code but something I am trying to figure out or learn. I code it in Pythonista (I have read about PyTo but don't need it just yet). If Python won't cut it then I type it out in Buffer Editor. Now I maintain an index of my code snippets in Numbers sheets to keep track of stuff. This time 50:50 split between the two and it works.
Most important use case, hand written notes. And with an App, searchable hand written notes.
On the iPad Pro, recently I found out it's possible to hook up a RaspberryPI as well for some more heavy lifting (but I guess by that point I would just not bother and bring a laptop)
And I have tried non Apple solution as well. A cheap Win 10 tablet followed by Surface Pro 6. With the Surface Pro I wouldn't need the RaspberryPI. In theory, it is the most comprehensive mobile platform and should do all of the above I have mentioned. However, the overall experience with that form factor and the clunkyness of Win10 as a touch based or tablet based OS spoiled it for me. I returned the Surface Pro.
Even with all it's limitations which I had to train myself to get around, iPad Pro is still the better mobile computing experience.
I dream that some day Apple will make a Thinkpad Yoga type device which will be running a full MacOS but will support the Apple Pencil and touch screen. OR an alternative dream is for Surface Pro to become less clunky in use as a tablet device.
I code in one terminal app and look at documentation on the second. I watch videos in the full screen and browse twitter using the slide in option. I love the multitasking tbh
"if I could go back to the pre-split-screen, pre-drag-and-drop interface I would. Which is to say, now that iPadOS has its own name, I wish I could install the iPhone’s one-app-on-screen-at-a-time, no-drag-and-drop iOS on my iPad Pro. I’d do it in a heartbeat and be much happier for it."
Weirdly there is just a setting and it is strange that Gruber doesn’t know about it.
“Drag applications from the Dock or Home screen to create Split View and Slide Over apps. Swipe from the right edge to reveal your last Slide Over app.”
I like multiple apps except for in Safari, where I semi-regularly accidentally activate slide-over by dragging a link when I'm trying to scroll a page. Getting out of this mode is a pain in the ass, because AFAIK, you have to drag the slide over into split-screen mode before in order to close it.
Anyway, in desperation I turned off multi-tasking, but it doesn't disable the drag-link-to-create-slide-over-behavior. Instead it becomes even worse because the dragged link replaces the previous window. Even worse, you can't click the Back button to get back where you were. Doubly-even-worse, Safari's history is and has been broken for a long time... not every link you've visited is in the history, titles don't match the page you were on, etc.
Anyway, whatever the hell Apple did to Safari as part of iPad OS... I hate it.
Thank you. It's a big article, it starts on the page 90 and ends on 147(!) there. Also, the article is from 1981 and Tesler already works for Apple, as seen on the first page.
To compare with the article date, Apple Lisa was released January 19, 1983 (and, by the way, Macintosh January 1984, iPhone January 2007, iPad January 2010 -- Jobs certainly had a system).
I think a big part of the mediocre sales is related to the use-cases that most iPad users have which seems to mostly be watching videos, browsing the internet, reading etc. Any 2 or 3 generation old iPad will do this fine with very little reason to upgrade. It doesn't have anything near comparable to the upgrade path that a lot of phone users who seem very eager to upgrade to a better camera/battery/etc.
Exactly. If it were not for the OS, the hardware seems to be a lot more capable than casual entertainment.
These use cases simply don't push the hardware to its limits.
My iPad must be 4 or 5 years old and seems perfectly capable of pretty much everything I use it for (videos from various sources), lightweight web browsing, looking at pictures, browsing Ordnance Survey maps...
Only reason I would upgrade is if I break it (unlikely as I don't take it outside very often) or when iOS upgrades stop (which is what happened to two previous iPads I have in a drawer somewhere).
He meant UX and feature-wise capable, not hardware-wise.
He's right, if the OS itself was more advanced, than even if the same people who own iPads now wouldn't be interested in using those features other than their regular media consumption, it would still open up a new market for the iPad (new target audience). But with its current limitations, it can't do that.
The iPad is a 20 BILLION dollar a year business. Let's not get crazy on "mediocre" sales, this is one of the most popular product line of all companies combined. Did not get as high as some people were expecting but this is far from mediocre.
Of course, you can only call it mediocre when comparing to the standout product lines. On it's own it's still a successful product. People have such high expectations for every one of their lines that some merely succeeding quietly is questioned. Says a lot about their success as a business.
If I've got a product whose sales were falling 5 out of the past 6 years, and whose current sales are 30%+ down from a peak of 6 years ago, I'm pretty worried about it.
I expect the iPad, lacking any new revolutionary functionality, to reach a steady state of (new customer + replacement rate) sales that is some percentage of its peak, pre-saturation sales. If replacement rate is every 4-5 years, this may be below 30% of peak.
This won't mean it isn't successful, just recognizing that existing users don't need to upgrade every year.
Thank you. We need to stop thinking of growth as a reasonable metric for wellbeing or relevance of products. When a new product is introduced, certainly, looking how the market reacts is interesting. But many years down the line, things should stabilise. Does your (metaphorical) baker round the corner grow yoy? And yet, somehow their bread is still good, and they have no problem surviving, except when a company with far too much capital just bulldozes in, for example by selling under local market prices.
For doing this sort of thing, most people can get by with a Kindle Fire, which are constantly on sale for $30-40. They are not anywhere near as good as an iPad, but for pure consumption they are more than adequate.
For a moment I thought this was going to be the solution, but then I looked into it and it turns out that you need an external power supply even for a flash drive.
I love that all the proposed solutions here totally suck. If the iPad would just work as a USB flash drive, all these convoluted transfer methods wouldn't be necessary.
"Suck" is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Between "plug the iPad into the computer and drag files from your computer onto a folder that's on the iPad's drive" and "drag files from your computer onto a folder that automatically syncs to the iPad," I count one less step in the second approach, but I guess YMMV.
> The worst thing is that the forced over-simplification of the UI features did not make it easier to use for beginners. I can see many people (including myself) struggling. So we have been forced into a "compromise" with all the downside, but none of the upside.
I wholly disagree, at least at the beginning. When the original iPad was released, I remember seeing multiple viral videos of two-year-olds being given iPads and instantly figuring out how to use them. At the time, this was surprising.
I think we've forgotten just how simple iOS was in the Steve Jobs era. You had a grid of objects, and when you tapped an opbject, your device became that object until you transformed it back with the home button. There was no control center, no notification center, and no app switcher—even when Apple added "multitasking" in iOS 4, it took the form of a little bar, not a new view.
I'm not ready to say Apple should get rid of Notification Center, because it's pretty darn useful. But I would like a single kill switch in Settings which turns all these features off. Then I could enable it for my grandmother.
The iPad, for its part, should be simpler than the iPhone, because simplicity is the iPad's reason for existence. Laptops exist because they are (and continue to be) the most efficient way to get things done. The iPhone exists because it's a relatively capable device that fits in your pocket.
And the iPad exists so you can browse the web and watch Netflix in a focused and leisurely way. iPads also make these tasks accessible for people who are not familiar with computing and will be more comfortable a simpler environment.
By attempting to make the iPad as capable as a laptop, Apple is taking away the iPad's very real original use-case in service of a use-cases for which the iPad is inherently ill-suited. And for what? To compete with a class of product which Apple already makes?
2010 iPads were great at what they did, and 2010 Macs were great at what they did. I legitimately don't understand why 2020 Apple is now on a mission to conflate these two product lines. Even if Apple succeeds at making the iPad as capable as a Mac, what will all their work have accomplished?
I have to disagree - the ipad shouldn't be simpler than the iPhone - it should be binary: simpler for the grandparents, powerful enough to compete against a surface. When I travel, I'm only taking 1 big screen. The ipad should replace my laptop for trips where I don't have to work a bunch.
> simpler for the grandparents, powerful enough to compete against a surface.
The UI of a 2010 iPad could replace your laptop on trips. If you just need a device to occasionally keep tabs on email and review photos and bring up websites, the iPad has always been great for that.
If you need to do anything more intense, the one device you bring really should be a laptop, especially as we become able to engineer laptops that are increasingly small and light.
I don't think it's possible to develop a UI that is both as capable as a traditional computer and as simple and intuitive as early versions of iOS. The more actions you add, the harder any action is to discover.
The surface is just a "standard" computer in a different form factor. It has both the utility of a standard computer and the complexity that comes with it.
I would love an OS X tablet, and I'm looking into making a Hackintosh one (it can be done). But it's not going to be an iPad, just like an iPad in a laptop case isn't a laptop.
Side note: the physical Home button that brought the device into a well-defined state was a godsend for new users. I observed this with both my parents and my grandparents: whenever they got "lost" somewhere, the fact that they could always press that button (and don't have to look for it! it's always in the same place, it's not auto-hide etc) and get to a familiar place, made things a lot easier. Oftentimes they'd use it in lieu of other, faster ways of getting from here to there - but I figured it's more important that they can get there.
I literally have no idea how any newbie will know how to use the iPad via the array of gestures to show the dock, go home, switch apps, move an app over another, move them side-by-side, know that you can use mutliple fingers on the keyboard to use it as a cursor pad.
I used to think the meaningless icons with zero text or popup hints were bad (they are!) and the zero differentiation between a UI item and ordinary text (a button or link just looks like ordinary text, so you have to fumble around with the UI to guess what you can press; horrible flatness) was bad, but the inability to discover gestures other than behaving like a 2-year old with their first "feeling/textures" toy is the worst.
So we need to add multitasking controls directly to the visible UI. That means they could be accidentally triggered much more easily, so we'd need to do that in a clear and obvious way that isn't confusing, doesn't lead to accidental triggering and is easy and obvious to get out of. Also they need to be unobtrusive and minimise the impact on the display of applications and content.
Clearly having obscure gestures trigger functionality isn't ideal, but are the alternatives actually better, or even viable?
I do agree with Gruber, the current gestures and behaviours are awkward. I can think of some alternatives that might help. One would be to run your primary app, then have a Control Center widget activate a multitasking layout, then it display the home screen as an overlay, so you can choose any app to go into the 'second slot' of the chosen layout. That may well come with negative tradeoffs, but at least the app selection/launch process would be familiar. There may be things that can be done.
However there are no magic wands here. Getting rid of gestures sound great, but then what do you replace them with?
A single gesture from one side of the screen, in the style of the Windows 8 charms? A set of buttons (side-by-side, floating, switch foreground/background floating etc).
Or put it on the dock. One gesture to learn - show the dock, multitasking actions.
> The iPads Pro outperform MacBooks computationally.
Off-topic, but it's an interesting choice to pluralize "iPads Pro", especially in a sentence where it could easily be singular ("The iPad Pro outperforms MacBooks computationally"). After all, there aren't different tech specs on the different iPads Pro (of the same generation). They just differ in screen size, IIRC.
Being fussy about pluralization and other assorted grammatical issues is something Gruber is known for to his fans. He famously (if you're deep in the Apple blog/podcast world) made a point of referring to the new Pro AirPods as AirPods Pro, which follows Apple marketing, but sounds completely ridiculous when spoken aloud.
That’s not what I suggested. There is one processor and RAM setup across all (current model) iPads Pro. There are multiple processors and RAM configurations on the various MacBooks Pro (ugh, that sounds terrible to me — I much prefer MacBook Pros). So if the iPad Pro processor (or whatever metric he was referring to) is faster than all the MacBook Pro processors, then it would be perfectly normal to say the one singular is faster than the other plural.
It would be like saying the iPhone 11 Pro has a better camera than all the iMacs (which vary by model, but none are as good as the iPhone).
ipad + youtube ( or twitch) has replaced TV for many people, and ipad is definitely a game changer in some niche professional markets where autonomy and keyboardless makes it a true alternative to paper (any people taking notes while standing).
i think the most lacking features are related to pencil interactions ( which still can't be used to enter text in iOS text fields easily), but i feel it's really slowly getting there
> The iPad was a new class of device, sitting between a phone and a laptop. To succeed, it needed not only to be better at some things than either a phone or laptop, it needed to be much better. It was and is.
For me the problem of the iPad is that it's merely inconsistently better at a slew of entertainment/consumption based activities but for everything else it's worse than any decent laptop. As even consumption-based workflows may involve intermediate bursts of typing, and just to extend the iPad's range into more uses I am tempted to have a keyboard -- but then it almost nears the inconvenience of carrying a laptop.
IMO to be revolutionary the iPad should convince you not to buy a laptop, or it should be as light as the kindle so that you would consider reading it Star Trek style for 20-30 minutes per day, as even the iPad mini is a bit weighty. Right now with the focus on iPad Pro and Air I think Apple is going toward the former.
> IMO to be revolutionary the iPad should convince you not to buy a laptop
The key thing sitting in the way of that for me, at least for the most part, is the lack of true background multitasking. I understand the need to avoid the battery problems of the Android ecosystem, but there needs to be some way to take an app and say 'yes, I really want to let this sit active indefinitely until I intentionally quit it'.
For a simple example, consider an IRC client: it's useless if it drops the connection every time you turn off the screen or switch to another app for too long.
> For a simple example, consider an IRC client: it's useless if it drops the connection every time you turn off the screen or switch to another app for too long.
I believe the "correct" way to do it would be to have a server in the middle, which keeps the connection alive, buffers the necessary data, and sends a notification to the device when appropriate. That is, unlike a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or smartphone is not designed to be a fully independent device.
Gruber is right that the iPad hasn't revolutionized an industry like the Mac or iPhone. But the iPad was launched smack in the middle of the iPhone and the Mac, not in the middle of a green field.
The iPhone had competition below it, from feature phones and Blackberrys. But there was nothing above it. Similarly, the Mac was launched into a very nascent market, where there were competitors (PCs), but it wasn't facing competition from above and below in the same way the iPad was.
Perhaps the iPad would have done better and grown faster if it had been made by a company that wasn't worried about cannibalizing iPhone or Mac sales. But surely part of the reason the iPad has been as successful as it has is that it runs the same apps as iPhones and has attracted devs who might not have otherwise been interested.
The iPad arguably succeeded because it wasn’t a convertible. However, now, especially given big phones, it feels as if some sort of tablet/laptop convergence will eventually be the future.
Mostly disagree. The camera progression on newer iPhones is a big differentiator [for many]. Also I don’t more or less always have an iPad in a pocket like I do a phone.
One big difference with the newer phones is low light performance. I have a bunch of "real" cameras but I so often don't have them with me if I haven't set out with the explicit intention to take pictures.
>I’m a hopeless photographer
Like anything else you can learn. You may not transform yourself into a great photographer but learning some simple rules and practicing a bit will take you a long way. Smartphones have limitations relative to interchangeable lens cameras. But there's a lot you can do with them.
I did that for a long time with a 7" Nexus tablet, but it's hard to carry an iPad in your pocket - even the Mini is almost 8", way too big for any of my pockets -, and if I have to carry a bag, I'd rather bring a full 12" laptop with me.
Work tried to upgrade my SE to an XR. The latter is unusable -- too large to hold in one hand while typing, too big for a pocket, far easier to drop, and absolutely no benefits from a larger screen - if I wanted a larger screen I'd get an ipad.
After a few years of frustration with trying to make my iPad useful for coding, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 and keyboard case for about 200GBP. Install Termux from the Google Play store (no warranty voiding rooting required). `apt install clang` and off you go.
The iPad I had before this was undoubtedly prettier and had a better UI, but the cheapest iPad is twice this price and after years of buying apps, faffing with file sharing, and even porting one or two interpreters across to iOS I never managed what takes 10 minutes on Android.
> The iPad has been a spectacular success, and to tens of millions it is a beloved part of their daily lives, but it has, to date, fallen short of revolutionary.
Why does everything have to be revolutionary? Pretty much everybody I know who has an iPad love using their device. It's a wonderful tool for media and web consumption, it just works for that use case very, very well. It can be used effortlessly, for multiple hours a day. Does it really have to do more?
Personally I just don't use split-screen apps on the iPad, but I'm not the least inconvenienced by the feature being around, behind some strange gestures I don't really bothered to learn.
> Personally I just don't use split-screen apps on the iPad
I think that's the problem. As somebody who uses splitscreen all the time, it's utterly painful. It's a great feature, but whoever designed it from a usability-standpoint was, quite frankly, retarded. The problem is that it could be so much better, even revolutionary, but it stumbles on the implementation of features like this.
It should do more to justify the price tag of the Pro model.
It should also do more simply because Apple's advertising for the product attempts very hard to push it into a productivity device angle, not a consumption one. Hence the "what is a computer?" debacle.
Plenty of iPad use within industry. Using it as more than just a consumption device.
Yesterday the guy fixing the mobile traffic lights was using an iPad to configure them / My gym gets me to change my membership plan using an iPad within a floor standing cabinet.
Ukraine's biggest bank Privat Bank figured that having the system on iPad is pretty superior to computers, they got LTE, batteries and even camera to make client's photo. So now their computers are mostly not used.
The iPad has slowly revolutionized personal computing. After the music production apps became available, including Apples own Garageband, the iPad has become a very common sketching tool for musicians. When the Apple pen and the Procreate became available, the iPad pro also became one of the most used tools for painting and sketching. An iPad pro with Apples keyboard, is more useable for most common day users than most windows based laptops.
>When the Apple pen and the Procreate became available, the iPad pro also became one of the most used tools for painting and sketching.
Yep. I had zero interest in tablets whatsoever, but the day I saw the Apple Pencil had launched, I went to a store to try it out. Ended up buying it and an iPad after less than 5 minutes of thinking.
Drawing pads for PCs were a pretty bad market before Apple hopped into the game. Your only real options were buying a "cheap" tablet at a couple hundred bucks (the lower end ones are inaccurate and barely a step above struggling with a mouse) with no screen and trying to adapt to drawing without looking directly at your hands, or you could spend a huge amount of cash on a drawing pad with a screen built in. The latter was really only available for people with loads of cash to spare and certainty that they'll be getting their money's worth.
An iPad with a Pencil barely costs more than a garbage bin drawing tablet, but you get a highly responsive screen and direct input. All of that plus Procreate is about the price of a 2 year Photoshop scheme.
The last thing to open up the digital art world this much to normal folk was Paint.exe.
> An iPad pro with Apples keyboard, is more useable for most common day users than most windows based laptops.
Do you think a young novice user with such an iPad, rather than a windows or mac laptop, would be as likely to develop a more advanced computer skillset? iOS seems easier for common users because it's more regimented, but I wonder if that same trait might leave less room for creative exploration of the machine itself. I can't say I have a lot of experience using iPads, so I'm curious what others think.
We have a desktop computer, a few laptops, and a few iPads. I've never seen any of my kids (elementary school age up to college age) try to creatively explore the machine itself. I'm a programmer and I've even tried to interest them in programming. Nope. All they are interested in is Facebook, Instagram, and other web pages. If it doesn't take place in a browser windows, they have no interest. But, they aren't even interested in web development! A computer is just a tool. They have no more interest in looking under the hood than they do tearing apart the engine of a car to see how it works. As long as the car gets them from A to Z, that is all that matters. If it breaks, well, that is someone else's job to fix.
I think that's the biggest lost opportunity of the iPad. I read through Alan Kay's Early History of Smalltalk [1] essay recently, and the level of applications young teenagers were developing with the rudimentary hardware is truly astonishing. The iPad is not facilitating that type of thing for the most part, but it also arguably goes in the opposite direction, encouraging a highly siloed, app-centric view of computing where users have even less direct agency over data.
The advantage of a keyboard-initiated search is that it works in all apps (or damned well should).
Mind: on Android, with a keyboard (bluetooth), poor app support is frustratingly apparent. Even where basic keyboard input is recognised, obvious things don't work as expected.
In Pocket, the backspace/delete keys won't delete tags.
In PocketBook (an eBook reader), hitting space when entering a search term (which cannot be initiated with Ctrl-F) ... scrolls forward in the document.
yes android physical keyboard support is completely useless.
I bought one of those foldy keyboard android tablets thinking I could use it as an about the house small laptop, but the issues you describe, and yet others, made it an utterly futile exercise.
The issue is the entrance into split-view, which should expose the springboard, not the dock.
The intuitive way to launch a second app would be to slide in from the right or left with two (three?) fingers, which would expose a compressed view of the springboard in split view. Then you could access all the apps intuitively (by swiping to the next page of apps) and launch the second app in the intuitive click-an-app method. This could even be tiled in a golden-rectangle geometry to expose a third app.
All you're trying to do is repurpose the slide-right slide-left function to expose springboard in a new way, which can be done with a multi-finger gesture.
Yes yes yes. I’ve often wondered why they didn’t do this. Having to go through silly hoops like full exit back to the spring board to launch an app so that it is available in the dock to pick for split view... why not just use the springboard in the first place.
The iPad has failed as a general purpose computing device, sure. But it has succeeded (along with other tablet devices of similar form factor) as a basis for a large and growing number of single-purpose use cases in various industries:
- iPad POS are popular in smaller coffee shops and similar outlets
- iPad-based document viewing solutions are used by pilots to replace large bags with manuals for planes that they used to lug around
- iPads are used for meeting room management solutions, information displays for customers and similar purposes where one single application is to be run basically 24/7 on a device with low power and space requirements, but where certain aesthetic requirements to the app as well as the hardware have to be satisfied
Granted, iPads don't hold this space exclusively. But so don't iPhones or Macs hold their respective application spaces exclusively, even though they significantly catalyzed their genesis.
The issue with each of these examples is that hardware advancements barely matter. $200 Android tablet with a simple enough design works just as well.
Apple doesn't want to participate in such markets. That's why they try to push creativity narrative, "what's a computer" and so on. iPad can only succeed as a premium enough product, and that requires software differentiation.
I get that, but after all it's not really Apple's choice what their buyers do with their devices. If they overwhelmingly decide the iPad is a nice base for this kind of application, Apple can either embrace that decision and cater to these customers (of which a good part are obviously ready to at least pay more than those $200 for the cheap Android tablet option, probably because of better update support as suggested by that other comment alongside this one) or try to make the device appealing to other target markets that they'd like to be in.
But when those other markets don't really take the bait, at some point it might be a good idea to accept that there is a market, but in a somewhat different place than originally anticipated.
iPad succeeds in these examples because it's a consistent environment with updates.
The problem with the cheap Android tablet is that unless the entire world standardises on a single model of tablet for these purposes you'd have all kinds of quirks around hardware, etc. Updates are also another issue even on premium-priced Android devices, so the cheap one is a lost cause.
All one has to do is leave them connected to power and WiFi overnight.
It's more likely that the typical cafe checkout iPad is silently updated on a regular basis, after close of business, and the staff don't notice at all; since they're going to be password protected, they just punch in in the morning, as usual.
I doubt it's so much doing updates as it is about support. If they have a vendor app (like Square on a tablet to take payments) and that abandons older OS versions to lower technical debt or for security reasons then at least they can update.
On Android you'd sadly find the lack of kernel compatibility with the chipset means that ever happens.
Updates can be provided by the community in many cases. Buy cheap LineageOS-supported tablet, unlock the bootloader and put LineageOS on, you're done. (Then once pmOS gets good enough for your use case, your device will be software-supported for the entirety of its useful life, by a mainstream, desktop-like OS. You don't get anything like that on the iPad - the best you can do is reuse it as an additional screen for a Mac via Sidecar.)
The community is not an acceptable answer for a business deploying thousands of these. With an iPad you are guaranteed X years of updates. With the community, you may or may not get an update, it might have quirks and installing it might be non-trivial.
If you're deploying "thousands" of these devices, you can standardize on a single model and even get custom support. The iPad might still be a good choice then, but it's definitely not the only one.
Yeah but you have to think about it. I feel like for many businesses thought/effort/time — even only a little - is more valuable than money.
[edit] and you also need to have someone whose aware of those options to begin with which is less common outside prigramming enthusiasts imho. Because Apple has amazing marketing discovering an iPad solution is easy.
> . $200 Android tablet with a simple enough design works just as well.
I mean, the normal (and I assume best selling) iPad is about 300, and will likely be supported for a lot longer than the Android one (my Air 2 is getting on for 6 years old).
This reminds me time (2013) where I had to choice new Nexus 7 or Ipad Mini 2. They were close in the price, in my country and they were both new. In few years , Nexus stopped getting updated and support but that Ipad mini got even ios 12 and still works well. For me Apple hardware is consistent and reliable that it can work well even more than 5 years.
I don't think you can really say that the iPad has failed as a general computing device, and that it is propped up by the situations below. What do you think generates $20B in sales? That's a lot of tills flight aids.
I think the iPad has succeeded as a general purpose computation device for normal people who use computers for email / music / Facetime / photos etc.
Always seems like its the 'power users' who don't seem to understand the iPad when the average person can pick one up and do most things they want to do with one.
That is not what I would consider "general computing device", more like "media consumption device", and yes, it is fairly good at that.
I would require a device to be regularly used for content creation as well in order for it to qualify as "general computing device". But pretty much the only "content creation" that I see happening on iPads in normal peoples' households is writing emails. By that account, our smartphones are certainly more qualified for the "general computing device" tag, because those are regularly used to create photos and videos in addition to mails and instant messages.
If by computer programming or media creation (videos etc) then I would say what you want is a specialist computing device - most people do not use their computers to do this, nor need them to be able to.
With an iPad you can write all the emails you want, edit and share photos, create word docs and basic spreadsheets, which is enough for the vast majority of people. I agree that phones are also general purpose computers, most people can get away with just having a phone now.
Maybe we dont agree on ‘general’ as a term, I mean what most people need or want, I think you maybe mean can do lots of different things?
Yeah, that must be it. I mean "versatile", which is a feature not everyone needs, not even a majority, but a large enough proportion of the market as to be relevant (especially since the remaining share of the market depends on those that need this versatility, because without content creators - a prime group requiring versatile computing devices - there's no content for those that don't need this versatility because they mostly consume).
I don't think I can substantively disagree with anything said here. Though I can think of a few places where iPad has revolutionised things; most notably point-of-sale. Especially for small businesses, I commonly see iPad and other tablet form factors used for retail point of sale.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadI still get “5e” instead of “the” about twice a month. And once in a while I will be typing and four words to half a sentence will just disappear and I still have no idea how I’m doing that.
A whole new text entry system wouldn’t go amiss for me, either.
I thought I wanted these features; boy was I wrong.
I don't edit text on the iPad for exactly that reason. As soon as I start typing fast using the screen keyboard, I keep losing stuff
I really feel like this should be a solvable problem though. It can’t be that complicated to select text reliably.
Right now replying to your comment on Windows, FireFox, with a mouse, I have just discovered a new text selection mode I've never noticed before[1] - double-click-and-drag selects whole words. Consistently up to the new word boundary on the right. That means it's possible to select an entire sentence up to (but without) the period. Or including the period and a trailing space. But not the obvious one to want - a sentence including the period and no trailing space.
[1] I know double-click commonly selects words, and triple-click selects sentences, but didn't know of double-click-drag.
[1] As I was saying only the other day: https://twitter.com/jawj/status/1221038674193932288
Yeah, you can read and play around with the phone to learn but something simple like cursor and text adjustment should be priority no. 1 in terms of alerting the user that a function actually exists.
The tradeoff was a 4-hour longer battery so there was probably more gained than lost there but the usable area to move the cursor shrunk considerably (to a long touch on the spacebar only) and makes it harder to use.
Yes, hidden and undiscoverable gestures are a problem.
I think judging the iPad based on changes they make for power users is near pointless in terms of its success.
Kid not screaming for X hours on a flight is a reason to buy and iPad for that trip alone.
Plus you can easily justify it to yourself as ‘educational’.
Hence it can almost be fitting to categorize them as toys.
the multi-tasking, drag&drop, split-screen interface is very complex and confusing even for me, who have been using the iPad for ten years.
I use my iPad Pro's multitasking stuff daily and it still confuses and infuriates me. Who came up with this stuff?
The iPad is a great device but, it isn't essential to anything or anyone. If tomorrow there where no iPads anymore, we would all just get on with our lives.
If I want to reply to an email I'll walk upstairs to my real computer rather than attempt to do it on our iPad.
As Joey Hess said[1] "If it doesn't have a keyboard, I feel that my thoughts are being forced out through a straw."
[1] https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/
I guess what OP was trying to say is that their application as creative tools (production vs consumption) is far more limited than the full fledged PC systems that we are used to.
What? In no way, especially for drums.
For graphic design (typography work, layout, UI, etc) mouse and keyboard are still the best input devices. Much faster and precise than tapping on a touch screen or using an Apple Pencil.
There are Android tablets with precise pen support, but especually the cheaper ones don't have that good pen precision (jitter, lag) and also the available drawing software is not as advanced as on the iPad & powerful ossdesktop drawig tools such as Krita or Mypaint are not yet ported to Android.
So in the end I basically had to get the top of the line Android tablet (Galaxy Tab S6) to get something comparable, where the manufacturer dumped so much mone so that some got also to the pen support & it would be working correctly. And so far so good. :)
The iPad Pros are credited with stopping the slide of iPad revenues - along with all of the accessories.
For specialized software, tailored to specific fields, with only the interaction elements for particular jobs the iPad can be a much better fit than a laptop. Those jobs however aren't generic enough that off shelf software make a ton of sense.
I’m not saying Office for iPad is pointless (I use it regularly, so quite the opposite!), but I do think it’s foolish to think an organisation the size of Microsoft’s doesn’t necessarily do things for obvious reasons. Individual incentives do not always lend themselves to data driven objectives.
Loss-making strategies can ultimately be profitable in a broader sense (if it increases the stickiness of the product on it's primary platforms, keeping away competitors, a strategic moat).
I don't think there's any evidence either way to be able to make any assumptions about the level of interest of the product, and whether or not that justifies it's existence.
I’m not sure any of the charting apps used by air carriers are even available on another OS at this point. I’ve never been aware of JeppFD Pro on Android and I believe they dumped Windows as well.
There are other options of course but as far as I’m aware in the US it’s all iPads and JeppFD Pro. The feds are familiar with it and a regulatory framework is created around it so it’s the path of least resistance. And as a pilot, I’d say most of us are pretty satisfied with it.
No I don't, I just brought that up because OP was confused why the pilot can use their device while "normal" passengers can't.
On day four, I received a push message (from Find My) that the iPad had come to life. An airport staffer had found it and charged it up. Presumably it cold boots with airplane mode switched off, so it connected to the cellular network, received the "lost device" command, displayed my contact info, etc. I received a call shortly thereafter.
When I picked up the iPad at baggage services, I chatted with the staff a bit. They let me in on the "secret" that most airline employees never switch their devices into airplane mode anymore, and for this exact reason.
plus they make it easy for customers to sign for services which in turn makes it easier for businesses to know that the work was done. toss in CC readers that attach easily and you have a simple POS device
if anything the amount of waste that would come back into our lives without them would be staggering
There likely is a good cost saving there, removing the need to transcribe handwritten forms and archive them in cases where the customers signed them.
It also easily gives you some tracking info, even if you only let it send location info when the service person uses it. That can give you the data to inform other customers on that service person’s route about arrival times.
The combination of portability (form factor, battery life, LTE modem), with the growing support for the apps. I’m yet to see device that would replace it for me. I have had to take my MBP with me for quite some time.
iPad essentially fuels my remote-first work style.
This would only be said by someone who isn't a frontline worker no interacts with any. Unless you see the people who use tablets for work as not really working.
It does however seem to have found it's way into various trades as an information device. For instance is has replaced laptop as the primary device in elder care in many cities in Denmark. It makes perfect sense to use an iPad, it's more portable, the limited interface forces developer to think hard about what input is really required, and it faster to"unlock" than a laptop.
The iPad has develop very quickly from a consumer device to an "Enterprise" solution. You basically only need it, if you can afford to have custom applications developed. For almost everyone else, there's the large screen iPhones.
Apple isn't going to tell us, but it would be interesting to learn how many iPads are going to customers, and how many to companies and governments.
Also, they are tremendous for the elderly. My 97 year old grandmother really struggles with desktop/laptop computers, but has absolutely no trouble using her iPad. It's the main way she stays in touch with her family.
I actually recently got my first personal iOS (okay, iPadOS) device and this is how I feel about many of the UI features. Touching some side of the screen triggers this or that surprising feature and I'm struggling to undo what I did to get back to the business. Maybe what's needed is good old RTFM, but having heard how easy Apple device are to supposed to be to use, it's kind of unexpected that so much of this stuff is not that discoverable.
Ah this brings back fond memories of Windows 8 :-)
I had to google it, obviously whilst cursing profusely the whole time. Microsoft have a lot of UI/UX people - it boggles the mind that someone thought this was a good idea!
Helpfully, choosing Help crashed the system, which accomplished my goal.
Gnome shell does some of this stuff well, but try using it for real work on a tablet and you start needing those arbitrary gestures again. Need to invoke the on screen keyboard? View the app overview? You're going to be searching the web for those gestures, guaranteed.
There’s also an iPad User Guide you can download in the Books.app.
You'll love this one: to undo (don't think it works for everything, but it does for typing), shake your device rapidly from side to side.
uh...they all make more sense on an iPad than the phone though lol.
> Many apps allow people to shake the device to undo and redo certain operations, such as typing or deleting. When initiated in this manner, an alert asks the user to confirm or cancel the undo or redo operation.
Considering that command-Z is not discoverable either, it’s not too bad, especially as there are undo/redo/clipboard buttons on the keyboard in most cases.
Traditionally, the keyboard shortcut for undo has been listed next to undo on the edit menu. That's pretty discoverable...
Ever time you manually click edit → undo, you'll see the shortcut. It’s not invasive—it’s not some big popup that takes over the screen, or even a neon-colored tooltip that commands your attention—it’s just there, in the background, in case you happen to notice it. Maybe you’re not sure what it means at first, but if you keep seeing it every day, you just might try hitting the sequence of keys at some point...
The best UIs naturally help you progress from a basic user to an advanced user, without you even noticing it. I'm not saying the traditional desktop UI paradigm is the best that can ever possibly be done, but it has had 30 years of evolution at this point, and it's pretty darn strong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
That was a rule for very good reason, and it will take some time to erode, but it’s definitely not as true today as it once was. It’s no consolation, but the first iPad - from the era of usable Apple design - was much better. Not in terms of power or weight, of course, but the OS didn’t have all these weird mystery-meat controls, gestures, broken multi-windowing etc.
Individual app’s capabilities also vary based on whether they are windowed or not. For example, you can’t airplay out of YouTube unless the app is full screen (even though once you’ve moved it to your Apple TV, you can switch away freely).
Discoverability is also crap. You have to dig into the manual (which you have to “buy” for free) to get the full details of the feature.
Swiping isn't even a great gesture for most uses. Earlier today, I had to delete maybe 50-100 downloaded podcasts from the Podcasts app (there is seemingly no way to do this en masse). The quickest way to do so is with repeated swipes, but it's almost impossible to be consistent with your swipes over 50-100 items: sometimes the swipes 'stop short', sometimes they just fail for no obvious reason. A swipe is also a LOT more physical effort than a tap — if I could have just pressed a "DELETE" button 50 times, it would have been a lot more palatable (still short of a proper multi-delete, of course).
Some kind of data-selection mode where I can drag across all the elements I want to select would be awesome.
You’re missing the iPad business model. You’re not allowed to do anything (except maybe wash the dishes or get dressed) when the iPad is showing an ad that gets you free something.
True multitasking would break the business model of thousands of sites.
I think you are misremembering. Every interview I can find points to Alan Kay being disappointed in the iPad. See this, for example: https://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-compu...
The worst thing is that the forced over-simplification of the UI features did not make it easier to use for beginners. I can see many people (including myself) struggling. So we have been forced into a "compromise" with all the downside, but none of the upside.
Given how great the hardware is (really, I think this is under-appreciated), I really hope Apple can get out of that thinking rut.
I also think that the slow iPad sales are directly connected to the mediocre OS software.
I believe Gruber argues completely the opposite: that the recent changes to add features like split screen make it more confusing (e.g. the example of his mother getting stuck in the split screen and calling him). He continues in the very article we comment here (emphasis mine):
"if I could go back to the pre-split-screen, pre-drag-and-drop interface I would. Which is to say, now that iPadOS has its own name, I wish I could install the iPhone’s one-app-on-screen-at-a-time, no-drag-and-drop iOS on my iPad Pro. I’d do it in a heartbeat and be much happier for it."
And I think that should be a configurable accessibility option: to have UI completely discoverable and non-stuckable, even if some "so-called-Pro" features need more steps (or can't be implemented). Or even better and safer: that should be the default, with "advanced" shortcuts as an opt-in option.
The interface should by default to never bring users to the point where they can remain "stuck" in some mode from which they can't get out.
Steve Jobs understood that that 100% "discoverability" and "non stuckiness" must be the default UI, that's why Gruber would like to switch back to that older ideal.
And Steve Jobs was old enough to learn that much earlier: that the "modes" are bad and that good UI doesn't require one to do some magic to switch between them, as it can be summarized in the joke: "How to Quit Vim and Exit the VI Editor — the most popular Stack Overflow question -- and I'm using vi last two years because I can't figure out how to exit it."
Even these "visual" UI changes that made the UI more "Ive-conform" (removing buttons and having only text) made the UI more confusing for anybody not trained and retrained. The back "button" in the apps was drawn as a button when Jobs controlled the UI. Then it got to be switched to just the < sign, which those who don't frequently use the UI never understand to be anything more than a meaningless symbol on the screen.
The more a software do, the less it's user friendly... You can't really compare Vi, a text editor that need training to master by technician, and the IpadOS. They are not made for the same people.
macOS is undeniably more powerful - It's the truck versus the sports car in the analogy.
But macOS is much much more straightforward and easy to use. I have far fewer things that I just have to memorize.
Though I always liked the line, “Vi is user-friendly - it’s just picky about who its friends are”.
(BTW, “ZZ” is usually the right answer to quitting/exiting - still funny to see, decades on, people teaching “:wq<return>”.)
- drawing in Procreate with reference material in the split.
- learning a song by singing + playing it on the guitar with chords and lyrics displayed, with it playing in Music† at the same time (on repeat + seek readily accessible)††
† I find it infuriating that no other music app than Music has considered split a possibility.
†† I'm aware there's a "Play" thing in Ultimate Guitar but it's absolute crap, playing a YouTube version that often doesn't match, obscures the sheet with a PIP, and is terrible to make repeat/seek. This is a perfect use case of functional composability using split screen.
I scan physical books to PDFs and read them as Quicklook from Files. Now, these books sometimes refer to other parts within the same book. So I almost always split the same book into 75:25 split. The smaller section section to move between the book/chapters, the larger section for focusing on.
I find this almost TWMish way of windowing actually helps me focus better than on the full MacOS.
Another use case. I write code on iPad(yes... I do), no.. not production code but something I am trying to figure out or learn. I code it in Pythonista (I have read about PyTo but don't need it just yet). If Python won't cut it then I type it out in Buffer Editor. Now I maintain an index of my code snippets in Numbers sheets to keep track of stuff. This time 50:50 split between the two and it works.
Most important use case, hand written notes. And with an App, searchable hand written notes.
On the iPad Pro, recently I found out it's possible to hook up a RaspberryPI as well for some more heavy lifting (but I guess by that point I would just not bother and bring a laptop)
And I have tried non Apple solution as well. A cheap Win 10 tablet followed by Surface Pro 6. With the Surface Pro I wouldn't need the RaspberryPI. In theory, it is the most comprehensive mobile platform and should do all of the above I have mentioned. However, the overall experience with that form factor and the clunkyness of Win10 as a touch based or tablet based OS spoiled it for me. I returned the Surface Pro.
Even with all it's limitations which I had to train myself to get around, iPad Pro is still the better mobile computing experience.
I dream that some day Apple will make a Thinkpad Yoga type device which will be running a full MacOS but will support the Apple Pencil and touch screen. OR an alternative dream is for Surface Pro to become less clunky in use as a tablet device.
Weirdly there is just a setting and it is strange that Gruber doesn’t know about it.
Settings->HomeScreen & Dock->Multitasking->Allow Multiple Apps
“Drag applications from the Dock or Home screen to create Split View and Slide Over apps. Swipe from the right edge to reveal your last Slide Over app.”
Anyway, in desperation I turned off multi-tasking, but it doesn't disable the drag-link-to-create-slide-over-behavior. Instead it becomes even worse because the dragged link replaces the previous window. Even worse, you can't click the Back button to get back where you were. Doubly-even-worse, Safari's history is and has been broken for a long time... not every link you've visited is in the history, titles don't match the page you were on, etc.
Anyway, whatever the hell Apple did to Safari as part of iPad OS... I hate it.
edit: I didn't realize there was a slide-over-switcher you can activate and then from there swipe-up to kill the slide-over you don't want. Still a PITA. https://www.imore.com/how-use-slide-over-and-split-view-ipad...
"Primary inventor of modeless editing and cut, copy, paste."
http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/CV_files/NOMO...
Since cca 1973.
Reference: doi:10.1145/2212877.2212896
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n103/...
To compare with the article date, Apple Lisa was released January 19, 1983 (and, by the way, Macintosh January 1984, iPhone January 2007, iPad January 2010 -- Jobs certainly had a system).
Only reason I would upgrade is if I break it (unlikely as I don't take it outside very often) or when iOS upgrades stop (which is what happened to two previous iPads I have in a drawer somewhere).
He's right, if the OS itself was more advanced, than even if the same people who own iPads now wouldn't be interested in using those features other than their regular media consumption, it would still open up a new market for the iPad (new target audience). But with its current limitations, it can't do that.
Source: https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/01/fun-with-charts-a-decade-...
If I've got a product whose sales were falling 5 out of the past 6 years, and whose current sales are 30%+ down from a peak of 6 years ago, I'm pretty worried about it.
I expect the iPad, lacking any new revolutionary functionality, to reach a steady state of (new customer + replacement rate) sales that is some percentage of its peak, pre-saturation sales. If replacement rate is every 4-5 years, this may be below 30% of peak.
This won't mean it isn't successful, just recognizing that existing users don't need to upgrade every year.
/rant over
Sounds intriguing. How would I go about copying the PDFs that are currently on my Linux PC onto it, though?
Classic solution is email it to yourself.
For a moment I thought this was going to be the solution, but then I looked into it and it turns out that you need an external power supply even for a flash drive.
Whatever file I put onto it is available on iOS, Android, a browser and WebDAV. It also supports camera upload.
Germany recently switched to Nextcloud[2] to share data between agencies and as a privacy-respecting alternative to G Suite / MS.
When I upload a .doc to the platform my iPhone can open it within the app. Same for PDFs.
[1] https://nextcloud.com
[2] https://nextcloud.com/blog/german-federal-administration-rel...
I wholly disagree, at least at the beginning. When the original iPad was released, I remember seeing multiple viral videos of two-year-olds being given iPads and instantly figuring out how to use them. At the time, this was surprising.
I think we've forgotten just how simple iOS was in the Steve Jobs era. You had a grid of objects, and when you tapped an opbject, your device became that object until you transformed it back with the home button. There was no control center, no notification center, and no app switcher—even when Apple added "multitasking" in iOS 4, it took the form of a little bar, not a new view.
I'm not ready to say Apple should get rid of Notification Center, because it's pretty darn useful. But I would like a single kill switch in Settings which turns all these features off. Then I could enable it for my grandmother.
The iPad, for its part, should be simpler than the iPhone, because simplicity is the iPad's reason for existence. Laptops exist because they are (and continue to be) the most efficient way to get things done. The iPhone exists because it's a relatively capable device that fits in your pocket.
And the iPad exists so you can browse the web and watch Netflix in a focused and leisurely way. iPads also make these tasks accessible for people who are not familiar with computing and will be more comfortable a simpler environment.
By attempting to make the iPad as capable as a laptop, Apple is taking away the iPad's very real original use-case in service of a use-cases for which the iPad is inherently ill-suited. And for what? To compete with a class of product which Apple already makes?
2010 iPads were great at what they did, and 2010 Macs were great at what they did. I legitimately don't understand why 2020 Apple is now on a mission to conflate these two product lines. Even if Apple succeeds at making the iPad as capable as a Mac, what will all their work have accomplished?
The UI of a 2010 iPad could replace your laptop on trips. If you just need a device to occasionally keep tabs on email and review photos and bring up websites, the iPad has always been great for that.
If you need to do anything more intense, the one device you bring really should be a laptop, especially as we become able to engineer laptops that are increasingly small and light.
I don't think it's possible to develop a UI that is both as capable as a traditional computer and as simple and intuitive as early versions of iOS. The more actions you add, the harder any action is to discover.
I would love an OS X tablet, and I'm looking into making a Hackintosh one (it can be done). But it's not going to be an iPad, just like an iPad in a laptop case isn't a laptop.
It's pretty amusing that IOS and Android are likely the reason that it's the year 2020 and "people who are not familiar with computing" still exist.
I used to think the meaningless icons with zero text or popup hints were bad (they are!) and the zero differentiation between a UI item and ordinary text (a button or link just looks like ordinary text, so you have to fumble around with the UI to guess what you can press; horrible flatness) was bad, but the inability to discover gestures other than behaving like a 2-year old with their first "feeling/textures" toy is the worst.
It just isn't obvious.
Clearly having obscure gestures trigger functionality isn't ideal, but are the alternatives actually better, or even viable?
I do agree with Gruber, the current gestures and behaviours are awkward. I can think of some alternatives that might help. One would be to run your primary app, then have a Control Center widget activate a multitasking layout, then it display the home screen as an overlay, so you can choose any app to go into the 'second slot' of the chosen layout. That may well come with negative tradeoffs, but at least the app selection/launch process would be familiar. There may be things that can be done.
However there are no magic wands here. Getting rid of gestures sound great, but then what do you replace them with?
Or put it on the dock. One gesture to learn - show the dock, multitasking actions.
Off-topic, but it's an interesting choice to pluralize "iPads Pro", especially in a sentence where it could easily be singular ("The iPad Pro outperforms MacBooks computationally"). After all, there aren't different tech specs on the different iPads Pro (of the same generation). They just differ in screen size, IIRC.
It would be like saying the iPhone 11 Pro has a better camera than all the iMacs (which vary by model, but none are as good as the iPhone).
i think the most lacking features are related to pencil interactions ( which still can't be used to enter text in iOS text fields easily), but i feel it's really slowly getting there
For me the problem of the iPad is that it's merely inconsistently better at a slew of entertainment/consumption based activities but for everything else it's worse than any decent laptop. As even consumption-based workflows may involve intermediate bursts of typing, and just to extend the iPad's range into more uses I am tempted to have a keyboard -- but then it almost nears the inconvenience of carrying a laptop.
IMO to be revolutionary the iPad should convince you not to buy a laptop, or it should be as light as the kindle so that you would consider reading it Star Trek style for 20-30 minutes per day, as even the iPad mini is a bit weighty. Right now with the focus on iPad Pro and Air I think Apple is going toward the former.
The key thing sitting in the way of that for me, at least for the most part, is the lack of true background multitasking. I understand the need to avoid the battery problems of the Android ecosystem, but there needs to be some way to take an app and say 'yes, I really want to let this sit active indefinitely until I intentionally quit it'.
For a simple example, consider an IRC client: it's useless if it drops the connection every time you turn off the screen or switch to another app for too long.
I believe the "correct" way to do it would be to have a server in the middle, which keeps the connection alive, buffers the necessary data, and sends a notification to the device when appropriate. That is, unlike a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or smartphone is not designed to be a fully independent device.
To be less pithy, 'just have a server in the middle' is completely impractical for some things, because that doesn't always exist.
The iPhone had competition below it, from feature phones and Blackberrys. But there was nothing above it. Similarly, the Mac was launched into a very nascent market, where there were competitors (PCs), but it wasn't facing competition from above and below in the same way the iPad was.
Perhaps the iPad would have done better and grown faster if it had been made by a company that wasn't worried about cannibalizing iPhone or Mac sales. But surely part of the reason the iPad has been as successful as it has is that it runs the same apps as iPhones and has attracted devs who might not have otherwise been interested.
Get an iPhone ~8 — no need for an 11 in combination with an iPad.
>I’m a hopeless photographer
Like anything else you can learn. You may not transform yourself into a great photographer but learning some simple rules and practicing a bit will take you a long way. Smartphones have limitations relative to interchangeable lens cameras. But there's a lot you can do with them.
1. Light up the thing I'm trying to photograph
2. Keep the bright light sources behind me insofar as possible (for example, pictures of a person with the sun behind them are really hard)
3. Turn on the grid lines and try to get interesting things either on the lines or where the lines intersect
4. Line up horizons or vertical lines so the photo is clearly oriented, unless I'm trying to be disorienting
ADDED: A couple of other things.
(Usually) have a clear subject of interest. i.e. focus in on something.
Probably related. If you are taking pictures of people, for example, get in closer.
Get in closer!
Are you too close? No
Regarding skills; while yes I could learn it — getting to a passable level is entirely possible. It’s just that I don’t really care that much.
Watching netflix, taking notes, even editing videos (holiday stuff for my own enjoyment), doodling, random browsing, planning trips, etc.
I consider its restrictions a feature.
Work tried to upgrade my SE to an XR. The latter is unusable -- too large to hold in one hand while typing, too big for a pocket, far easier to drop, and absolutely no benefits from a larger screen - if I wanted a larger screen I'd get an ipad.
Let's me query sql, full programming, normal IDE for NetSuite stuff I need to work on. It's great
The iPad I had before this was undoubtedly prettier and had a better UI, but the cheapest iPad is twice this price and after years of buying apps, faffing with file sharing, and even porting one or two interpreters across to iOS I never managed what takes 10 minutes on Android.
Why does everything have to be revolutionary? Pretty much everybody I know who has an iPad love using their device. It's a wonderful tool for media and web consumption, it just works for that use case very, very well. It can be used effortlessly, for multiple hours a day. Does it really have to do more?
Personally I just don't use split-screen apps on the iPad, but I'm not the least inconvenienced by the feature being around, behind some strange gestures I don't really bothered to learn.
I think that's the problem. As somebody who uses splitscreen all the time, it's utterly painful. It's a great feature, but whoever designed it from a usability-standpoint was, quite frankly, retarded. The problem is that it could be so much better, even revolutionary, but it stumbles on the implementation of features like this.
It should do more to justify the price tag of the Pro model.
It should also do more simply because Apple's advertising for the product attempts very hard to push it into a productivity device angle, not a consumption one. Hence the "what is a computer?" debacle.
Yesterday the guy fixing the mobile traffic lights was using an iPad to configure them / My gym gets me to change my membership plan using an iPad within a floor standing cabinet.
Yep. I had zero interest in tablets whatsoever, but the day I saw the Apple Pencil had launched, I went to a store to try it out. Ended up buying it and an iPad after less than 5 minutes of thinking.
Drawing pads for PCs were a pretty bad market before Apple hopped into the game. Your only real options were buying a "cheap" tablet at a couple hundred bucks (the lower end ones are inaccurate and barely a step above struggling with a mouse) with no screen and trying to adapt to drawing without looking directly at your hands, or you could spend a huge amount of cash on a drawing pad with a screen built in. The latter was really only available for people with loads of cash to spare and certainty that they'll be getting their money's worth.
An iPad with a Pencil barely costs more than a garbage bin drawing tablet, but you get a highly responsive screen and direct input. All of that plus Procreate is about the price of a 2 year Photoshop scheme.
The last thing to open up the digital art world this much to normal folk was Paint.exe.
Do you think a young novice user with such an iPad, rather than a windows or mac laptop, would be as likely to develop a more advanced computer skillset? iOS seems easier for common users because it's more regimented, but I wonder if that same trait might leave less room for creative exploration of the machine itself. I can't say I have a lot of experience using iPads, so I'm curious what others think.
[1]: http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
I'm enjoying the mental training of learning to scan text for keywords myself, but from time to time this is a feature that I miss ...
Works in Safari anyway.
Mind: on Android, with a keyboard (bluetooth), poor app support is frustratingly apparent. Even where basic keyboard input is recognised, obvious things don't work as expected.
In Pocket, the backspace/delete keys won't delete tags.
In PocketBook (an eBook reader), hitting space when entering a search term (which cannot be initiated with Ctrl-F) ... scrolls forward in the document.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...
I bought one of those foldy keyboard android tablets thinking I could use it as an about the house small laptop, but the issues you describe, and yet others, made it an utterly futile exercise.
The intuitive way to launch a second app would be to slide in from the right or left with two (three?) fingers, which would expose a compressed view of the springboard in split view. Then you could access all the apps intuitively (by swiping to the next page of apps) and launch the second app in the intuitive click-an-app method. This could even be tiled in a golden-rectangle geometry to expose a third app.
All you're trying to do is repurpose the slide-right slide-left function to expose springboard in a new way, which can be done with a multi-finger gesture.
- iPad POS are popular in smaller coffee shops and similar outlets
- iPad-based document viewing solutions are used by pilots to replace large bags with manuals for planes that they used to lug around
- iPads are used for meeting room management solutions, information displays for customers and similar purposes where one single application is to be run basically 24/7 on a device with low power and space requirements, but where certain aesthetic requirements to the app as well as the hardware have to be satisfied
Granted, iPads don't hold this space exclusively. But so don't iPhones or Macs hold their respective application spaces exclusively, even though they significantly catalyzed their genesis.
Apple doesn't want to participate in such markets. That's why they try to push creativity narrative, "what's a computer" and so on. iPad can only succeed as a premium enough product, and that requires software differentiation.
But when those other markets don't really take the bait, at some point it might be a good idea to accept that there is a market, but in a somewhat different place than originally anticipated.
The problem with the cheap Android tablet is that unless the entire world standardises on a single model of tablet for these purposes you'd have all kinds of quirks around hardware, etc. Updates are also another issue even on premium-priced Android devices, so the cheap one is a lost cause.
The distinction here is Appliance vs Computing Platform. And so far many tablets are seen as appliances, not computers.
All one has to do is leave them connected to power and WiFi overnight.
It's more likely that the typical cafe checkout iPad is silently updated on a regular basis, after close of business, and the staff don't notice at all; since they're going to be password protected, they just punch in in the morning, as usual.
On Android you'd sadly find the lack of kernel compatibility with the chipset means that ever happens.
[edit] and you also need to have someone whose aware of those options to begin with which is less common outside prigramming enthusiasts imho. Because Apple has amazing marketing discovering an iPad solution is easy.
I mean, the normal (and I assume best selling) iPad is about 300, and will likely be supported for a lot longer than the Android one (my Air 2 is getting on for 6 years old).
I think the iPad has succeeded as a general purpose computation device for normal people who use computers for email / music / Facetime / photos etc.
Always seems like its the 'power users' who don't seem to understand the iPad when the average person can pick one up and do most things they want to do with one.
I would require a device to be regularly used for content creation as well in order for it to qualify as "general computing device". But pretty much the only "content creation" that I see happening on iPads in normal peoples' households is writing emails. By that account, our smartphones are certainly more qualified for the "general computing device" tag, because those are regularly used to create photos and videos in addition to mails and instant messages.
With an iPad you can write all the emails you want, edit and share photos, create word docs and basic spreadsheets, which is enough for the vast majority of people. I agree that phones are also general purpose computers, most people can get away with just having a phone now.
Maybe we dont agree on ‘general’ as a term, I mean what most people need or want, I think you maybe mean can do lots of different things?