From the press release: "The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $799 (US) for the Wi-Fi model and $999 (US) for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model; the 12.9-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,099 (US) for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,299 (US) for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model."
For me this is one of those announcements that I'm excited to see the new version, so that I can maybe buy the previous version ;)
That's not a knock on the new version in any way, just a reflection of how much I value this particular type of device / where I feel I need more power and etc.
I just purchased the iPad Air last week. The model I went for was 720 in my local currency, and after today's shop update is now 850. It looks like the Magic Keyboard also increased from 270 to 330.
Still can't believe the M2 chip is hobbled with Stage Manager.
Dear Apple,
I want my iPad to become a Finder based full-fat macOS when it's on the Magic Keyboard and I want it to be Springboard when I take it off the Magic Keyboard.
Yeah, I don't really know who Apple is hoping to sell these to. My ex-boyfriend bought one of the earlier iPad Pros with some grand ambitions, but he mostly ended up using it for Netflix, Twitter and emails. I think that totally legitimizes the existence of the smaller/cheaper models, but who is Apple selling these to in the long-term? Even the mediocre Surface Pro has a decent software experience that explains why someone might continue spending extra on it. But I don't know who the iPad Pro is for, especially these souped-up models. 120hz is nice, but... who the hell is going to need or even appreciate a high-refresh rate on an iPad? I reckon most "pros" would be happier if they sacked the high refresh and upgraded the panel to a 60hz OLED one.
I'm just spitballing though. The iPad probably won't make sense for most of us until it's discontinued or they add macOS to it, whichever comes first.
as an avid comic book reader, the 12.9" iPad Pro is _perfect_ for reading comics, you don't have to zoom in or out at all and you can simply read. The 11" model might be fine too but I've only ever used the 12.9" model. It's slightly oversized, like the treatment some of the deluxe hardcover graphic novels get, and it's absolutely glorious to be able to read without zooming in.
I'd love to get a newer iPad, but the price is bananas for me given the use case. I bought the pre-2018 model and it's still holding on but I'm going to be bummed when this one reaches the end of it's usable life due to software updates and such because I can't afford (or, justify maybe) one of the newer models.
> as an avid comic book reader, the 12.9" iPad Pro is _perfect_ for reading comics, you don't have to zoom in or out at all and you can simply read.
The really cool thing about this, for those who haven't tried, is that in landscape mode the 12.9" is really really close to the same size as a two-page comic spread, so you can read them like they were intended, not one page at a time. It's a little smaller, but not much. Makes a huge difference vs. page-at-a-time reading.
(I use Chunky, which is amazing and I wish the author charged money for it or had more options to pay them than one mostly-unnecessary and really-cheap IAP, because it's really good and I never want it to go away)
What do you use to read comics? When I was looking into it some months back the best readers of the past were all unmaintained and didn't work properly and the newer apps wanted to charge me a monthly fee to read comics from local storage with no option to buy.
I bought a 2G ipad pro and it was very useful as just a writing tablet. Unlimited paper, though I had to get a paper-like screen protector since otherwise their wasn't enough friction between the screen and the pen to make me happy.
I'm disappointed there aren't more pen-based programming experiences out there, but I can't really think of any useful ones myself either.
I’m not the op, but I am a “pen based note taking enthusiast“.
I have owned both a gen 1 remarkable, and an older iPad Pro. In my opinion, the remarkable is garbage in comparison. The note taking app is just so far behind. And cross platform seems it’s never going to happen.
My note taking app of choice is always: write, by stylus labs. It’s wonderful, and really expresses what I hoped pen based writing would always be. Especially the undo-wheel. For quickly scrolling back a whole word or sentence. But the real killer here is that it’s cross platform. I can move the notes to the native Linux app or the native windows app.
That having been said, I am forever annoyed that I can’t run Xcode on either Linux or my $1000+ iPad. Also, on the iPad, there are ridiculous restrictions in how you are allowed to run apps side by side in split screen.
/sigh
So the race for the good pen note taking device is still on for me.
I have hope that soon the Pine Note will take off and allow me to finally run write by stylus labs on a platform with development tools. In this case Linux.
Again, Apple could win me back by opening access to dev tools. Either in the iPad itself or cross platform on Linux/windows—or by allowing me to install macOS on the iPad.
Remarkable could win me back by opening the platform and allowing my to install write by stylus labs.
Dell or Lenovo could win the race by shipping a 2-in-1 with a current generation processor and Linux officially supported, and preferably pre installed.
But it honestly looks like pine 64 is out in front in this race.
Have you tried the Pine Note? As someone who really likes Pine 64, and has a PineBook Pro along with a couple of Pine Time watches in my device petting zoo, it's worth pointing out that when they say something is only suitable for early adopters, they *really* mean it.
Make no mistake. Their stuff is great. But I'm not buying something they tell me is for early adopters unless I want to write code for it and use JTAG to load that code, possibly with a handbuilt wiring harness.
Like you, I'm willing to take Pine64 at their word that they are still "crowdsourcing system level software". I am eagerly awaiting their monthly blog update/podcast. Tragically, last month's update didn't happen. So, we've all been a little in the dark.
The reason the iPad Pro works so great for writing is the 120Hz refresh. I don't think we will see that in an e-ink system anytime soon, but I can always dream.
I have a 2018 model and love the 12.9" screen size for media, note taking, reading, sketching, etc.
That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I don't do anything that needs a desktop class processor.
Artists do love the performance though, people use them for video editing or large image editing with lots of layers.
Edit to add - 12.9" is also helpful for using two apps in splitscreen. Might become less important with Stage Manager, we'll see how I like that.
That's what I don't really understand, though. Even the artists and video editors who use these devices aren't actually leveraging all of the power in the machine. Photo editors and artists are mostly still constrained by single-core performance, and video editors are mostly just leveraging the GPU's video accelerators. The "full power" of the M1 or M2 doesn't even make sense for these pro customers.
That's why I still think an "iPad Max" makes much more sense. Even to professionals, the iPad is ultimately a content consumption device. So, Apple ought to lean into that. Make an iPad you can love with a big screen and punchy OLED panel, while cutting back on the CPU cores to optimize for battery life and thermals. Even if they never put Stage Manager on it and ditched the LIDAR camera, I think these things would sell like hotcakes at the right price.
I think you are underestimating the power of pencil combined with Letter sized screen for people who read research papers, take notes and need entertainment when traveling - potentially entire higher ed students.
I just bought an M1 iPad Pro last week and I am impressed with how easy it is to navigate and annotate pdf documents
I don't think I do. I used to own a Surface Pro with their Surface Pen, basically the same experience and I used it for everything from reading manuals to flipping comic book pages. It was great, but none of it's greatness was predicated by "the power" of it's chip. The iPad Pro would be equally as attractive if it used the base-model chip and ditched the LIDAR nonsense, and it would be cheaper.
This just has to be a big use case. There’s a very large community of wealthy people who are extensive business travelers and their core job description is reading and marking up documents on the road.
Think lawyers, finance, basically anyone doing “deals” is in this category. As someone with about 3 million frequent flier miles lying around I’ve seen a whole lot of them in airports.
I have one too. Big screen, thin profile can be used in an airplane seat or wherever, has a cell connection so you don’t need to fuss with wifi to send back comments on something quickly.
It’s really a great application for these things. Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares, when you live on the road and shit depends on you, you just max out all the choices and press the order button.
> Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares
Lower income consumers who would appreciate lower prices.
Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company at this point. The only way for them to grow another 50% from where they are today is through mass market adoption by regular people.
Or maybe these high end devices aren’t meant to drive revenue as much as they are meant to keep power users happy while focusing on other revenue streams for meaningful revenue growth.
> That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I don't do anything that needs a desktop class processor.
This right here. I literally only buy them for the screen size, and because Android tablets are... really bad and largely have much worse (for my purposes) software available, even if I could find one in that size.
I never really push the processor or graphics capabilities.
The screen size is incredible for: PDF reading, drawing and art generally, a little video editing maybe, sheet music display and other music purposes, comic book reading, as a portable second screen for a Macbook (it's a very similar size to a 13" Macbook screen), portable SSH terminal, remote desktop, and yeah, watching Netflix or whatever.
But I could easily get by with the brains of a much lower-end model. However, I expect the larger, higher-quality (for faster refresh for drawing and such) screen is a big chunk of their cost to manufacture it, so I'm not sure how much cheaper such a thing would really be.
I truly don't even know what I might do with one that'd really use all that horsepower. Gaming I guess? But I don't like my games vanishing or breaking when I update an OS, so I don't game on iOS very much. Pinball and (now that it's been re-released, finally) Angry Birds. That's about it.
At the most general level, it does run a 2732-by-2048-pixel display at perfectly smooth 120 hz, and that looks great with the Pencil. But I'd give that up to save a couple hundred bucks.
The main bummer with the base iPad display is that it's still using sRGB, while Apple has been using P3 gamut pretty much everywhere else since the iPhone 7. Not sure if I'd downgrade to that one, but I'd be fine with a 12.9" iPad Air.
> That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead.
I bet you can find used ones for much cheaper. I still love my aging 2nd generation 12.9" iPad Pro from 2017. Of course we would all love products even more if they were cheaper, law of demand and all that.
Probably why she only edits 90% of her work on iPad. I think there's a huge percentage of non-developers who are exactly in this boat – can do 90% of their work on an iPad, and enjoy that experience, but keep a traditional computer around for the 10%.
They have Photoshop on the iPad and Adobe says it’s “built with a no compromise in quality and performance”. Which means buggy as any Adobe product but useable. It really can’t get worse than Lightroom on an older intel Mac. An iPad Pro M1 also beat a MBP 16” with an i9 in Geekbench for multi core.
Video editing is also crazy good on an iPad Pro and iPhones.
Well, video editing is crazy fast on iPad and iPhone, that doesn't make it good. Apple goes above-and-beyond building hardware accelerators into their GPU for video content, but the form factor of the iPhone/iPad is considerably worse than editing with a Macbook. I feel the same way about music production on iOS - the hardware is willing, but the software is weak.
Yes but she said life is nicer somehow using the iPad. Maybe she can do the same on the laptop but she also has a nice garden she likes to do her work in, vs the iMac is my understanding
> Yeah, I don't really know who Apple is hoping to sell these to. […] The iPad probably won't make sense for most of us until it's discontinued or they add macOS to it, whichever comes first.
Apple knows who they're selling to. Apple's iPad dominates the global tablet market (along with Samsung and Amazon), so there's evidence that it's made sense for its target market for some time now.
> This is a notable differentiator that's easy to see and feel for iPad users.
I agree. We're talking about a device that most people use to watch video though, so they're not going to really be revving it beyond 24hz.
120hz screens are great, but if I didn't play first-person shooters with my friends then I'd have no reason to use mine. Like I said, an OLED panel makes much more sense for the iPad, and arguably the Macbook Pro.
> We're talking about a device that most people use to watch video though, so they're not going to really be revving it beyond 24hz.
Interesting. I don't use my iPad for video much, but I'm going to assume you're right and I'm in the minority. In that case, a nice benefit for cinephiles is that 120 Hz is an integer multiple of 24 Hz, while 60 Hz is not.
iPad Pro has a strong foothold in digital art. Not having to learn how to split brain with a Wacom is a game changer and there aren't many competitors in the space that aren't wayyyyy more expensive.
I have the original (from 2014?) and it is still in use every day. I bought it for sketching but never really used it for that too much. For note taking (with a pen) it has been in use every day. I used to go through stacks of notepads and it was nice to replace them with a digital tool as it makes storage and retrieval much easier. It was an extravagant purchase at the time, but $1100 has started to look relatively after 8(?) years of use.
iPad Pro is amazing for audio, photography, and of course art creation. I am just starting to dip my toes into the audio world and the number and quality of soft synths, sequencers, effects, mixers, etc. is actually breathtaking. The ipad is especially useful when used in conjunction with physical instruments and live performance. A regular laptop isn’t nearly as nice to use in the moment. Suzanne Ciani uses the Animoog Z app on her ipad along with her $20k+ Buchla Modular synthesizer rig during live performances. I have also been enjoying live streams from Pittsburgh Modular. He uses an ipad for sequencing and effects along with the hardware synths.
Having a more powerful ipad allows more and more sophisticated tools to be made for it. Apple brings the capability and developers take advantage.
I have a 2018 iPad pro with a pencil and keyboard, and I love it. It's good for:
* Working on game assets using the Affinity tools (Designer and Photo)
* Second monitor for my Mac when I'm not at my desk
* Chat/videoconference tool, leaving me able to use my computer during virtual meetings
* Travel machine. I can do most of my office-y stuff on it, and use it to ssh into production things. Gitpod lets me do some light coding from there in a pinch, but if I'm planning on a lot of that I usually just carry the Macbook. Because a portable rig with two monitors is damn nice for writing code.
* Reading and annotating PDFs
* Documentation viewing while writing code
* General reading
* Using a square reader to process payments
I suspect that this will likely easily be replaced by a current Air when the time comes, but it's easily useful enough for me to want it. And when you consider that the ASUS portable monitors run in the $300-400 range, and the Wacoms are around $600, I don't feel like I'm severely overpaying.
> but who is Apple selling these to in the long-term?
I've thought this about every iPad model they've made, but obviously I'm wrong every time. I'm sure there are specific professionals who will find this useful, but in my guess is that most iPads are sold for casual use. As to why you would buy the higher-end model, because if you're in the market for an iPad, you probably have disposable income, you might as well get the shiniest one you can.
Proper external display support was pulled from the initial release of iPadOS 16 because it was super buggy.
From the press release:
> Full external display support for Stage Manager on M1 and M2 iPad models will be available in a software update later this year.
Not in the initial release. They pulled external display support from Stage Manager in later betas to get it working on older models with the A12X and A12Z instead of only the M1 and newer.
External display support is supposed to come back in an update later this year. Presumably that part will still require an M1 or newer processor.
as an ipad mini owner, i selfishly hope they make it work on the a15 as well. I don’t know how unfavorably that chip compares to the a12z, but it seems very fast on the ipad mini.
I don't think apple will implement something like this if it cannibalizes sales of a higher end product with more profit margin. I wouldn't expect a feature like this until there is a ipad sold for the price of a MacBook pro plus an ipad(e.g ipad super pro for 2000$).
> Apple doesn't want non-artists to buy iPad Pro instead of MacBook. They want people to buy both.
I see the resident Apple bashers are already warming up their cannons firing a few rounds.
But perhaps we need to take a step back here for a moment....
First you need to consider the security and general platform profile of iOS which is fundamentally different from MacOS. Running MacOS would greatly weaken the iOS security profile of Apple mobile devices, and you have to remember that the devices are not just used by consumers but they are used widely in the corporate world too. iOS loaded with corporate apps is a much more attractive security footprint for corporate IT departments. Personally speaking, I very much like the tightened security footprint of iOS. I wouldn't want to run full-blown MacOS on my phone or tablet, even if I could !
Second, prior to Apple silicon, non-mobile hardware ran on Intel. So Apple were justifiably technically constrained by that fact. However, if you observe Apple today though, you can see MacOS on Apple Silicon allows you to install iPhone/iPad apps simply by downloading them from the App store as you would on an Apple mobile device. I would argue therefore that with time, we may see further blurring of boundaries in both directions.
I (non-artist) use my iPad + magic keyboard as my primary non-work computer. The battery life is great, it's instant on, has a touch screen, you can play games on it, and it's more portable than a laptop being 11 inches. In general it makes for a great every day device. The only things I don't try to do on my iPad is anything programming related.
I have a friend who bought one to replace her aging laptop with the iPad pro. She wanted it for the touchscreen to navigate and touch up photos (but not via pencil really). But she does also use it often for spreadsheets and email as well, and since you can have multiple apps side by side now, it works for her. She does this at her work environment which doesn't have space for say, dual screens or an office, so it makes sense for her.
I see this comment often. I just find it comical that people really think they know what goes on inside of Apple product meetings. Ipad Pro 12" is as expensive as a Macbook. Perhaps Apple doesn't want people to use full MacOS on an 11" screen because it's not as usable as you think it is...Apple is not out to blindly maximize its profit at all times.
That could end up being a two-headed monster, with some apps working fine in ‘iPad mode’ and looking awfully out of place in ‘Finder mode’ and other ones looking good in ‘Finder mode’ and bad in ‘iPad mode’.
Unless (almost) all their apps (including third-party ones) would seamlessly switch from a mouse-driven MacOS UI to a pen/finger drive iPad UI, I think most users would be disappointed with that.
Hell, just give access to the Hypervisor framework now that M1/M2 chips natively support virtualization. I would gladly use a macOS or Linux VM on an iPad if it didn't require constant workarounds. UTM is ready it just needs the App Store barrier removed.
As a user experience it's no less jarring than GeForce Now, XBox remote play, Steam Link, Plex, VNC apps, iSH, Blink, etc.
I want my iPad to become a Finder based full-fat macOS when it's on the Magic Keyboard
And Apple doesn't want you running unapproved software so that's never going to happen unless macOS gets a lockdown mode (only app store apps, no terminal or Unix access, etc).
Yea, it works well and is plenty fast on a LAN (remote may be laggy). Some things you can't test using emulators, namely App Store stuff I believe, and you need to screw with the resolution/scaling so you can read the text.
I threw a GitHub runner on mine so I can do iOS builds from it.
If you are needing it for web dev, the Inspect browser on iOS works great for that purpose. It is annoying you have to pay $10 for something that should be built in.
There is also one called literally "Web Inspector" from "And a Dinosaur" or something which I believe is free and a Safari extension which pops up devtools on my iPhone
Looks really nice, but as a developer I'm unwilling to give that up on my local system! Maybe one day if cloud only becomes a lot better, but even then feels like a downgrade.
I did with the 2018 11” + Magic Keyboard. I felt very capable of doing most day-to-day tasking with the keyboard and mouse. Video calls sucked because the camera is off to the side when in the Magic Keyboard. Stage Manager might help even more, I found the previous “windowing” features to be lacking.
I have been, for backend development only. I live most of my life in Blink shell connected to a Linux machine. Works great as a very expensive dumb terminal. https://blink.sh/
Cons:
- Multitasking is weak. You can put two windows next to one another as long as you want them to be in a vertical split. The "pull out" side window feature doesn't work on the home screen for no discernible reason, so if you have Things in the side app then open it from the home screen, it's no longer opened in the side app and you have to manually move it back. (append: I haven't tried Stage Manager yet; maybe it will address some of this)
- Hardware keyboard support is pretty weak. The settings app and shortcuts app are two examples of apps with bad keyboard support. The "full keyboard access" is a very strange modality: it turns tab into a chording key. There's no equivalent to "focus all elements" as there is on desktop, so for example if I press tab from this text box, the "reply button" is not selected; the search at the bottom of the page is.
- Web access is a must. Individual apps might provide offline support, but many have sub-par sync systems, where you'll discovered that your offline files have helpfully been completely deleted and require resyncing, but since you're already on the plane by that point you're out of luck.
All in all: works great as an expensive dumb terminal.
I use a 5th gen iPad mini for web, email, telephony, ebooks, photos & video capture, but I use older Intel Macs (MBP 2010 & mini 2012) for local media server, storage, photo and video editing, torrent, file manipulation and transcoding, word processing & desktop publishing, pdf generation & editing, VM & emulation, and all the things that iDevices won't easily or gracefully allow or anything I happen to prefer on macOS. Granted, with effort, one can do nearly everything on iDevice, but it isn't always convenient. But upwards of 90% of the things I use Apple technology for is web browsing, email, and watching a movie or tv show, and this incidentally makes my Macs more secure and less needy of administration. I would like to have a new Mac, but I really can't justify it because I no longer use them for web and email, all the old Mac software can still do what I need it to do, although heavy processing takes longer, because the Macs are really in the background, it doesn't slow me down.
Been using my iPad pro 2017 12.9 since 2015. It's basically my email/web/books/video/social device, but also can do work stuff in a pinch. It's not ideal for work, but it's more practical than my 12 mini if I need to do emergency stuff.
I also use it for presentations, sketch out designs and architecture, etc, but it's harder to clean up documents on the iPad because the editing on it is awkward compared do a laptop. For certain things diction works, but just copying and pasting a couple of rows in excel (or any spreadsheet like thing) is just really bad.
That said, the tool you have with you is the best tool, and it's really portable. It's 7 years old at this point and still going strong. It won't use a bunch of the new features in 16, but since I don't use those anyway I don't care.
If you want to test out an iPad, pick up a 1st or 2nd gen iPad Pro. I have three of them around the house (including mine) and the other two get used all the time for video/games/browsing.
Some things work great on the iPad, and for those things the iPad is absolutely fantastic and I will often prefer to use it.
If you want to infinitely scroll, the iPad is unparalleled. It is great for reading and watching. I like it as a game device. It is great for reading news and I enjoy apple's news widgets. Kindle works well. If you want to consume, the iPad is an amazing tool for consumption.
Additionally in the last year, apple made it really easy to use your iPad as a second screen, either as an iPad or as a literal second screen for your macbook. I found myself doing that more and more.
I bought the apple pencil thinking it can't possibly be worth the money, but it is an enjoyable device to use. Writing text on an iPad is more gimmick than feature (for me), but I find it a pleasurable way to scroll or navigate apps.
That being said, once you want to do a task with a keyboard, there is no replacing a laptop. The iPad is also locked down (no terminal, only safari) such that a laptop is still necessary. The iPad is still very much a luxury device and could not stand on its own. Phones and laptops both have features that the iPad does not have that make them necessary. The iPad offers nothing that makes it necessary unless you consider an ancillary screen for your laptop necessary.
I did for ~5 years but switched to the m2 air, complex tasks and multi tasking are much much easier, as well as dev work which is possible in a very limited way on iPad. I always used it with the keyboard attached and the laptop has a better hinge for screen angle too
I love how "Desktop-class apps" means extremely basic features available decades ago on desktop: "consistent undo and redo, a redesigned inline find-and-replace experience, a new document menu, customizable toolbars, and the ability to change file extensions, view folder size".
True, but only for users of the v2 Apple Pencil with the new iPad Pro. For folks with v1, or with an iPad/Pro that doesn't support hover (or who just use our fingers), discoverability will continue to be a challenge...
I'd argue that is exactly what they are doing. Their promotional material and many users are already using iPads as desktops... and they seem to be catering to them.
Could be, but at what point will they stop, i.e. how long before the iPad becomes the Macbook Air? In any case: if they don't stop then I'd think one of those would have to go, makes little sense keeping 2 product lines which are like almost the same?
> if they don't stop then I'd think one of those would have to go, makes little sense keeping 2 product lines which are like almost the same?
I feel like this is exactly what they want. My only question is how much i'll be able to modify my laptop long term. Ie i run Nixpkgs (ie the package system from NixOS) on my laptop. The day i can't modify my Mac OS to my liking is the day i stop buying their laptops.
I do think there's a market for people who want laptops that have the lockdown of phones. Where less things can go wrong because you can't change a lot.
> The day i can't modify my Mac OS to my liking is the day i stop buying their laptops.
That was my mentality too. For me, the cutoff came when Catalina dropped (and I couldn't run 32-bit libraries, even after modding MacOS). Nix was the last thing keeping my sanity together when I last used MacOS. When they pull the plug on that, it's going to be a sad day...
> I do think there's a market for people who want laptops that have the lockdown of phones. Where less things can go wrong because you can't change a lot.
I agree. That's a software problem though, not a hardware problem. Much like the situation on iPhone, Apple could easily offer a "pro mode" or "developer mode" that offers extended functionality while disabling certain high-security features.
If MacBook Air is a browser machine, then it's already happened. If it's a creative work machine, then well, it's close, but you still probably have a some kind of PC nearby.
If it's a developer machine, then the best iPad can do is being a ssh terminal or VSCode browser. A superb terminal, I use it every day to work because I don't have personal laptop.
It has always been artificial market segmentation. Their message is clear: don't buy apple if you want a laptop with a touchscreen. Apple will only sell you oversized phones and regular laptops.
And don't buy a Windows laptop if you want a laptop without a touchscreen because the UI will be designed for touch even if you only use a mouse. Although macOS is unfortunately trending in this direction also.
> don't buy apple if you want a laptop with a touchscreen
Keep buying Apple laptops, got it. I know that a large number of people keep asking for laptop with touchscreen, but this is one design decision where I whole heartedly with Apple. Touchscreen on laptops make no sense. The use case for a touchscreen is significantly different from a laptop that it makes sense to have two classes of devices.
Then again, I don't really get the large number of iPads sold either. It seems like an extremely niche devices which would only find a use case in certain types of industry.
Yeah I've never used a laptop and wished I could touch the screen to do something. I don't want to lift my hands off my desk to move something around on the screen. I might not be a good representation though because I don't even like moving my hand off the keyboard to use the mouse
Touchscreens on a laptop are kinda silly, especially if it isn't convertible. I will say though, I use touchscreen gestures to navigate my desktops pretty frequently. Blindly reaching for a three-finger swipe feels a lot more natural than pausing to look down at my Touch Bar and figure out what the hell I want to press...
I use the magic trackpad, that feels more natural that touching the screen. 95% of the time my laptop is docker to a USB-C monitor, so having a touchscreen would be a little weird. For professional use, I'd guess that most people have a larger monitor hooked up anyway. For a touchscreen to make sense, my monitor would need to be touch as well.
The issue with the Touch Bar is the same, that's not a professional feature, or even particular useful. Apple knows this, because you can't buy a magic keyboard with the Touch Bar. If it was useful, the Touch Bar would also appear on the those and it doesn't. I'd love to know how many MacBook Pros are sold with and without the Touch Bar.
Trackpad gestures are great too, I use my Magic Trackpad 2 on my Linux desktop where I don't have any touchscreens. Still though, I think the display as a multitouch surface shouldn't be overlooked. It's pretty much perfect for gesturing.
The best part is that those trackpad gestures translate almost 1:1 from macOS to iPadOS. And you can use magic trackpad with iPad too (although it makes more sense for me personally to use the trackpad built into the iPad magic keyboard case). I havent really used iPad shortcuts before all that much, but once i accidentally triggered a few of them after using it with a trackpad due to the muscle memory from macOS, it all clicked perfectly.
I installed OS X on my old Asus Zenbook and the touchscreen still functioned... but yeah not once did I ever think "wow I want to apply my fingers to my laptop screen instead of using the large precise touch surface within easier reach" besides for novelty
I'm always surprised at the pushback from people when the topic of touchscreen laptops comes up. I love mine, even if I don't use it a ton. It's a collection of delightful little things: a modal dialog box that I just reach up and tap Okay. Resting four fingers on the back of the display and using a thumb to scroll a web page. Any situation (like on an airplane) where space is limited, reaching for the screen can be better than using a touchpad. I don't use it instead of mouse/touchpad, but I use it as an additional input, and again, it's delightful.
Apple could let customers launch iPad apps on their Macs and use a touchscreen. But they don't, because they'd rather sell you two devices. It's silly, artificial market segmentation.
You could actually get a full desktop experience from a tablet back in 2003, with products like the NEC Versa Litepad [1] running Windows XP. With a fully-fledged x86 processor, you could run anything a desktop could run.
It was pretty neat, but I can tell you from experience that coding using handwriting recognition isn't a great experience :)
All of the Tablet PC's running XP Tablet Edition were terrible. I will die on that hill. I tried probably about 10 different versions and the company I worked for was a reseller for them so I got to play with a lot of them. It was just Windows XP with pen input slapped on and it *sucked*.
Safari history has been broken for something like 4-5 years. About 1% of time back button will take you one step too far (i.e. will show your home page instead of google serp)
God damn thank you. This interaction used to be triggered by deep pressing on the keyboard and it drove me insane when they got rid of it, I couldn't find any settings to turn it back on but this works!
My 2017 iPad Pro can do that. I can tap and drag on the cursor to move it. I can also long-tap and drag on the spacebar to move the cursor like a touchpad. I can also drag with 2 fingers anywhere on the keyboard to move the cursor like a touchpad. The first 2 options also work on my iPhone.
It seems reasonable for "desktop-class" to refer to the basic features that have typically distinguished desktop personal computers from alternatives like smartphones and tablets. What else would you expect "desktop-class" to mean?
Powerful features that are more than a glorified ^Z. Reminding actions to finger shortcuts, quick access through a command palette, etc.
It'd be like me calling McDonald's restaurant-class because they could suddenly give you a plate. Sure, it's a component, but the porcelain isn't why I go to a restaurant, it's to have a qualified cook doing things with his expertise.
I really struggle to find a use case for the iPad over my Macbook Pro from 2014.
- It sits on my lap with the screen sitting upright without the need for a case to sit it upright
- I prefer using a keyboard over a touch screen for desktop like applications and browsing
- The trackpad being on my lap or directly in front of me is more ergonomically friendly than having to reach forward to touch the screen
If I was to need to buy another laptop, it would be another Macbook over an iPad.
As far as I know, this is the first Apple hardware to support Wifi 6E, which is something I've been waiting on for what feels like forever.
I'm hoping the rumored new laptops will also support 6E.
For those that don't know, Wifi-6E uses the 6Ghz band, and I anticipate it will be very helpful in crowded residential environments where lots of Wifi APs are all landing on the same few 2.4 and 5Ghz channels.
I can't understand the emphasis on more bandwidth. The pain with wifi is overwhelmingly dominated by the slowness establishing a connection (why does it take more than a second?!), with connection reliability and latency (for video calls) also being important.
"Wifi 7: 10 Terrabyte/sec transfer speeds" *yawn*
"Wifi 7: Connects in 500 ms, latency 20 ms, tri-band fallover for 5-nines reliability" *Opens checkbook*
I've never once noticed slowness in connecting as bothering me at all. Are you connecting to new Wi-Fi networks hundreds of times a day or something? My iPad just... stays connected to the networks it knows.
And I believe that higher bandwidth is the solution to better reliability and latency when you've got lots of devices sharing the same router, or other interference. Isn't that how digital radio works?
In fairness, I do notice the time to connect to my home network much more when waking my Macbook Pro from sleep than my iPad. But it is still noticeable on the iPad.
The place where the slowness is most noticeable on iPad is when I want to reconnect it to my iPhone's hotspot. I need to reconnect many times per day because the iPhone turns off the hotspot when its unused for 90 seconds to save battery, and this behavior infuriatingly cannot be disabled.
This is the only thing I’ve missed over the years after switching to Apple. The androids I owned would keep the hotspot enabled all day, apparently without killing the battery.
I notice it all the time. The delay is really annoy when you go in an elevator (so no cell signal) and wait for it to reconnect to your wifi when you step out.
Last time I looked into this, I seem to remember that the Wifi protocol actually had ridiculous hard-coded wait times, e.g, broadcast, listen for 500 ms, then move to next step if nothing heard. I remember being baffled and never understood how that it could possibly be really how it worked, so I definitely might have been misinterpreting.
> The main purpose of scan is to update/confirm the
available WiFi SSID list around the user’s device. There are
two types of scan: active scan and passive scan [3]. The
active scan is triggered periodically: the mobile device first
broadcasts the probe requests, and surrounding APs after
hearing the probe requests will reply probe response packets,
containing information such as the supporting physical rate.
The mobile device will add the SSID of the AP into the
candidate list, if it finds that the AP is compatible. In the
passive scan, the list of available SSIDs can be updated by
beacon packets broadcasted by APs periodically, e.g., every
100ms [4].
In any case, a good protocol would have random wait times that are still (in expectation) of order the rate at which bits are communicated, not some human timescale.
Relatedly: When I turn off a network by pulling the plug on a router, it takes many seconds for this to be reflected in the list of available networks on my Macbook. I don't think there's a good reason for it to be like this.
Agreed! The thing about 6ghz is that it doesn't travel through walls as well, and tends to have shorter range in general.
On the surface, this seems like a negative, but if you're in a crowded apartment building, it can actually be a major benefit. Even if a bunch of your neighbors end up using it on the same channel as you, you won't experience as much interference because the walls will attenuate their signals.
Of course, a single AP might not reliably cover your entire home in 6ghz, but you can always fall back to 2.4 and 5ghz and/or get more APs.
Additionally, WiFi 6 (and 6e) is better in general at detecting neighboring networks across all frequency bands and reducing interference automatically.
If they're configured correctly, multiple APs on a given network can actually lead to lower congestion, because they can each lower their signal strength to only cover a small area... but it sounds like that isn't what happened here.
8 in a single small home is absurdly excessive. My home is more than twice that size and I only have a single AP (although I have been considering adding 1-2 more.)
The iPad Pro is one of the expensive products that I never regret paying 800$ for. Incredible speed, smooth UX, long lasting battery, really doesn't even come close to the previous (Intel-powered) iPads.
Wait you couldn't hover over the ipad and it didn't show you a pointer? The galaxy tablets had this since a few generations, why didn't apple do this earlier?
They keep on pushing on the power of the iPads. Out of curiosity, does anyone really use their iPads for something they’d consider really compute intensive? I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos. Any time I want to do anything complex or computationally intensive I find a laptop to be much more efficient, both in terms of the OS flexibility and better input devices.
I doubt that. Many very serious artists use Procreate on an iPad as their primary medium, and I honestly can't think of a better tool without jumping about a thousand dollars in price, loath as I am to say it.
Give me XCode and Preview (I use the pdf page-re-arranging/deleting/etc a lot) and finally put a fucking calculator on iPad OS and I can stop using macbooks at all. I mean for personal devices, at least, I'd still use one for work since they give me one anyway.
> I find that the best use of a tablet is reading and watching videos.
I think HN forgets the 'pros' using the iPad Pros are video, photography, visual-arts and music professionals.
I'm as disappointed as the next dev on HN that iPadOS still doesn't allow me to run a full version of Xcode. But then I remember there are perfectly good laptops for that, and I'm not the target audience for these devices
I mean, I don’t understand how I could really use an iPad in my workflow as a photographer. Everything is slower without a keyboard, and for raw editing I use a whole bunch of knobs.
I could see maybe using it at the right type of session to quickly review images on a larger screen, but the last time I looked into it there wasn’t a super great way of doing that. Maybe I could cull photos on my iPad but unless I transfer for the photos to it and then back off I’d need to work over my network and that’d probably be slow…
Everything relating to moving files, SD cards, etc. is just a hassle in Apple tablet/phone world. Ironically, a PC just works.
Same goes for music production. I've tried using a few iPad DAWs over the years, but it's so much slower than using a keyboard and mouse, or just popping open your Macbook with Live. Apple already has a product segment that does fairly well with this market, trying to force the iPad into being something it's not just looks silly.
Producing may be faster on desktop for now because they've had a large head start on optimizing the interfaces for mouse and keyboard, but those affordances are still a subset of what you can do with a touch screen. Touch screens won't replace dedicated controllers with physical knobs, but digital knobs are surprisingly usable.
Touch is far better for performance though. Watching Suzanne Ciani seamlessly integrate her Buchla modular rig with the ipad makes me appreciate just how good the ipad is. A regular computer would be far more cumbersome to use with hardware synths in the moment.
Not really? The iPad isn't velocity-sensitive, and it doesn't have aftertouch or any tactile feedback. A "regular computer" at least has straightforward MIDI routing that you can perform with - the iPad gets outclassed by decade-old Octatracks in terms of performance flexibility.
Ciani is the perfect example that I was about to bring up myself. I got to see her perform live at a conference, and out of her whole setup, she waxed poetic most about her iPad.
Similar things were probably said about smartphones with touch screens being inferior to physical buttons.
After using my tablet as a second screen for production, photo editing, CADing, and coding, it's become woefully apparent that the mouse - a tiny singular cursor - is an inferior grandfather to an interface that _also_ supports multitouch, and the only thing holding tablets back is software. Obsidian is a good example of a mobile app that has parity with its desktop version in both maintaining its keyboard shortcuts but also enabling touch interactions closer to the affordances of physical notes.
I see a lot of people using an iPad for music alongside a proper computer with a full featured DAW. You don't need a mouse or keyboard shortcuts for idea generation, sketching out rough concepts from inspiration on the go or playing with some of the pretty unique synths & other tools available on iPad. For modular synth simulation I've found iPad with Pencil to be a much much better UI for me than using a mouse.
Think live performance instead of DAW work. Using a sequencer, effects, or additional soft synths on the ipad along with hardware synths is much nicer than fiddling with a mouse or trackpad.
"Much nicer" is a bit of a stretch (I use a touchscreen laptop with my DAW). The difference between clicking-and-dragging a knob is not that different from tapping-and-dragging one. Same goes for performance; the iPad is not velocity sensitive, and it does not have aftertouch. At that point, you're probably adding in a MIDI keyboard or other hardware, at which point you may as well just perform with a real DAW and leave the iPad at home.
Dodging and burning and masking and using other photo-related tools with a mouse and keyboard feels like I'm producing a very calculated photograph. Using a stylus and multi-touch screen feels closer to the original affordances of crafting and manipulating a physical photograph. For the best of both worlds, I use the iPad in Sidecar / second-screen mode so I can use keyboard shortcuts with 1:1 stylus input.
Oh, I agree about the mouse bit - but Wacom (etc.) tablets have been around forever. I’d also much rather keep my head straight and my arm at rest on my desk all day.
Heck yeah. "Reading" sounds boring and easy, except when you have to quickly skim through 600-page PDFs with illustrations, and switch between those. This is a common use case for anybody designing electronics. I will take every CPU cycle I can get.
The existing iPads were already the best devices for this kind of thing, but faster is always better.
I still find it sad that:
a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
b) Companies do not ship better iPad apps. At this point, Fusion 360 would work better on this M2 iPad than on most PC machines, but we only get a half-baked "viewer" thing which doesn't really do anything useful.
>Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
Doesn't faster CPU tend to imply potentially better battery life?
This made me wonder: Why do PDFs feel so much slower and bulkier compared to something like viewing HTML over a browser? When it comes to displaying static images and text, shouldn't PDFs outperform HTML pages by miles?
I don’t think it’s true in general, you may just used bad PDF viewers. I can scroll through a content-rich PDF much faster and smoother, than a similarly resource-packed website.
Yep. You can actually use WebKit to render PDFs in Linux and it works perfectly fine as well. Performance problems seem to be most prevalent when you browse them in a web browser.
Yep. With PDF Expert on an iPad, you can instantly see a thumbnail view of your pages, as well as swipe the page slider through 600 pages with a thumbnail being shown for each of those as you swipe.
This does get slower for some pathological PDFs, which is why an even faster CPU would help.
> a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful. And I don't do any of them, gaming aside (I have a mediocre Windows PC for that, and even that is often using only a fraction of its power for gaming).
The one and only time I've given my m1 Air a real workout is playing with one of those AI art generators, but it's not like that was something I needed to do, or I'd have felt like I was really missing out if I hadn't done it. I did it because I could and it was low-effort.
> Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful.
Oh, there are plenty — for one, I would really like to have a good CAD/CAM application. Parametric, history-based, like Fusion 360 or SolidWorks. There is Shapr3D which is absolutely amazing and shows what the hardware is capable of (take a look at the demo videos), but nothing I can use for actual work.
These kinds of apps need both a reasonable GPU for rendering and a really good CPU for computing constraints in sketches, and then for recomputing solids.
Unfortunately, Fusion 360 being an Autodesk product, we aren't even graced with an Apple Silicon version on the Mac yet, even though it's been what, two years since Apple Silicon is out? The application is a slow pig, where usability comes last. So I guess I can keep on dreaming.
Or take electronics CAD — having KiCAD on an iPad would be amazing.
Yeah, not a ton, I didn't write none. 3D modeling, cad, running scientific models. Gaming. Hi-res video editing workflows. Machine learning. I guess "crypto" junk. And some of that (machine learning, crypto, probably most compute-intensive scientific models) aren't something you probably want to do on a tablet or laptop except in a pinch, anyway, because a purpose-built server's much better-suited to it and you probably don't need continuous and detailed visual feedback.
But I don't think it's weird that people struggle to come up with ways to really use super-powerful hardware, because most folks don't do (and don't want to do) much of the above except maybe gaming, and most people who do game don't do it—or at least not in a way that's taxing on the hardware—on all the kinds of devices they own.
The cool stuff lots and lots of people actually use tends to end up in dedicated hardware or paths, like video codecs and image processing and face recognition and all that, not mainly processed by the general CPU or graphics power of their platforms.
Most folks don't do complicated video editing or music production, that doesn't stop Apple from optimizing their hardware around that, too. The problem isn't a lack of demand, but rather the inverse - there's so much demand for new software, that Apple can make tens-of-billions of dollars just off the app distribution platform alone.
The crux of all this is having the option to run the software you want on the hardware you own. No, I don't do 3D modelling, CAD, scientific simulation or gaming on a daily basis. But I do use that software sometimes, and a device that excludes the possibility of running any of them doesn't sound fun or "limitless" to me. It all leads to the feeling that the iPad is a Disney-fied version of a professional workflow.
Right now I'm drawing comics using CLIP Studio Paint, which really is a desktop app that runs seamlessly on the iPad (literally it appears to be the same code as what I have on my Mac!)
Each page is ~5000x7000px with dozens of layers including many effects and even 3D models. Even my 2018 iPad Pro breezes through this workflow. With the pencil, it feels like exactly the right device for what I'm doing.
I would play games on my iPad... but there aren't very many that work, because Apple hasn't spent the time (or money) making Metal support widespread. Really, they should just fund / build their own MoltenVK implementation, but I would guess that they don't want to support two paths. It's surprising how MoltenVK only has one full time dev, I could easily see Apple throwing some money at that with huge returns.
My compute intensive tablet activities involves a cheap chromebook duet remote desktopping into an actual desktop already efficiently setup for my workflows. I'd rather wait for reliable remote work solutions / infra than try to cope with subpar workflows.
Interestingly the Apple Pencil "hover" feature doesn't require a new generation of Pencil — this works on the 2nd Gen.
Overall, this looks like it is clearly aimed at creators. I have the 2018 Pro with Magic Keyboard and have zero interest in upgrading to this model. Honestly I almost wish I could trade my Pro for a Mini, since it's more pocket-able, and I mainly use my Pro for demoing my startup's technology.
I wonder why developer tools are not a priority for Apple for “pro” iPads. At this point, it uses the M2 chip so the limitations on running IDEs, compilers and other tools just seem arbitrarily imposed.
I'd even be happy with a performant VM app that I could run linux on at this point. It would be so nice to be able to swipe up and go from linux VM -> imessage, etc.
Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have both stated that they don't hesitate to cannibalize their own products, and Apple has proved that many times over.
Especially at the scale in which iPad having developer tools could ostensibly cannibalize Mac sales — there's no way this would be a factor in the existence of those tools.
We saw a huge push to bring the mac near iOS territory (the Mac Store, gatekeeper, catalyst, the new design language etc.) . If Apple could, I bet they'd exchange every new mac for an iPad and effectively gain the tightest control they could ever get of a huge part of the ecosystem.
There are developers tools for iPadOS, they're just not anything you can do professional work with.
The main problem, I think, is most development tools require a relatively low-level of operating system access that Apple has not figured out a way to do given what they want iOS/iPadOS to "be".
My suspicion is they'll eventually find a way to do containers in a manner that's relatively "safe", and they'll lean on Cloud-based build tools that move the hard work off device.
I keep hearing about the desire for developer tools on an ipad and I just don’t get it. The entirety of iPadOS would need to be overhauled in order for it to be conducive for developer work. What is the appeal of doing dev work on a touch based UI with limited access to the file system on a cramped screen? The Mac is perfectly set up for that work.
I don’t want to use the touch interface while developing. I want to be able to do development on the same device that I can use the touch interface for other things as well, like using the Pencil to markup screenshots or design docs. It seems ridiculous that I still have to carry around a bigger, heavier laptop just for that one final use case.
I also have been using a 13” mac for years, so “cramped screen” doesn’t really apply to me on a 12.9” iPad pro’s XDR. It is more than capable, and I would hopefully be able to plug it into my external monitor at home.
I’ve done a significant amount of coding on a terminal on an Android phone.
> The entirety of iPadOS would need to be overhauled in order for it to be conducive for developer work
I disagree. I used an iPad for sysadmin, datascience, some math, and some web dev. Most of the pain comes from arbitrary restrictions Apple places on iPads. (I’d imagine it’ll get more painful as my eyes worsen.)
The appeal is simple: Being able to develop with whatever device you have on you. A laptop beats a tablet, a tablet beats a phone, and a phone beats pencil and paper.
I want it to just run macOS. The 12.9" M2 iPad Pro is absolutely perfect for me in every way except the gimped OS. The screen is great, plenty of storage, amazing battery life, it's light and portable, WiFi 6E, and a cellular modem. Everyone has their own unique needs but for me this would be the absolute ultimate work device... if it ran macOS.
As it stands I have absolutely no interest. It's generous to describe "Stage Manager" as a gimmick.
They wouldn't even need to overhaul iPadOS! All they'd need to do is allow Parallels, VMWare or other folks to make virtualization software for the iPad, and people could just run Linux on it (or - gasp! - macOS). The M1 and M2 Macbooks can run virtual machines without a problem, but iPads are not (sigh) allowed to. Despite Apple explicitly and inexplicably selling 16GB models of the iPad Pro.
I have a Smart Keyboard Folio case, which is super slim and light. My 12.9" 2018 iPad Pro is smaller and light but still has a good keyboard feel. (Note: I have a mechanical keyboard on my home Mac, but can still type like a demon on the thin iPad keyboard. It's surprisingly ergonomic.)
I know there's basically no chance I'll be able to run Emacs or VS Code on this portable little device any time soon, but if I could, it'd be my main device by a long way. There's no hardware limitation preventing it, just artificial restrictions on a "pro" device.
Sure. And if we’re going that route, Emacs in Blink is perfectly usable. I just wish this well > $1000 computer was allowed to run the kinds of software I was running on far less powerful systems. I usually have cell or Wi-Fi connectivity, but sometimes you have an idea on an airplane, ya know?
Interestingly, the 11 inch iPad Pro still retains the LED display of the 2018 iPad Pro, unlike the FALD display of the 12.9 inch.
Seems like display technology has matured and reached an equilibrium pricing state if even Apple can't justify the cost of investing in producing the fancier displays in a second size.
From what I understand it's the exact same cooling design except the larger surface area and thermal mass of the 12.9, which is almost entirely negated by the larger display generating more heat.
Pretty surprised they left the front camera on the side of the device. I can't figure out why they would think that makes sense after using it even once. It's so awkward trying to do a meeting and I have this weird camera angle coming from the corner of my face. The alternative is portrait orientation, which puts the camera really far from the center of the screen - feels like it's coming from above or below my face - and puts my video feed opposite to the orientation of my audience's screens, while also not being able to lean on the folded case.
I have an iPad Pro with A15, and it holds battery better than my M1 MacBook Air on video calls. They are both great though, much better than any x64 devices I have ever had.
It works perfectly fine. Only main difference is that, in landscape mode, instead of people seeing you look slightly down instead of into the camera (like laptops), people see you look slightly left instead of into the camera.
99% of people seeing your image in the call won't notice or care. Especially when things like your lighting setup make most of the difference that people do notice, which has nothing to do with the camera you're using.
Are you saying unusable because attachment to keyboard skews image centering/symmetry?
I use my iPad for video calls (Zoom) all the freaking time and it's fine, but perhaps that's because i have it in the tall orientation so the camera aligns.
Everyone's creepily staring into nothing anyway. Except those of us who try to look at the camera instead of the screen most of the time. Which means we're not actually looking at anyone's face, even though it looks like we are, which is another problem.
Being a bit off-center is the least of the problems with video calls.
Yeah this would be an improvement I think, considering how little I've seen iPads used in portrait mode it's a little surprising they haven't done it already. I'm guessing it's to support the pencil charging, since the new iPad does have cameras in the expected landscape location but only supports pencil 1
I would almost want to create a new thread for this, but what is the use case of a tablet? Is this for fulltime physical meeting goers to stylishly take notes?
Is there some benefit to using this over a laptop?
I was on the fence when the iPad Pro M1 was released, it seemed to finally tick off as a laptop replacement for some of my hobbies (photography and music) but unfortunately it is not a desktop OS, not supporting desktop workflows and apps that I'm used to.
If it was a screen-only version of my MBA M1 I could definitely ditch the MBA and use an iPad exclusively, even if it required attaching a keyboard sometimes. The lacking software still makes it much more of a luxury to me than something to actually replace my use cases for a portable computer... I could afford one but see absolutely no usage given that my MBA is already extremely portable and works like I expect.
I know it's very niche and doesn't apply to everybody but I know of a bunch of comic book/comic strip artists that are doing more and more work on the iPad pro and less on their Wacom devices.
I bought my iPad (non-pro) mainly to play online chess, to read comic books, and for D&D pdfs at the table. It's also a nice web-browsing and video watching machine. The iPad Pro's are a bit excessive for that sort of "consumer" usage though.
The only great use-case I've seen for the pro is 2d digital art. I have a few artist friends who love the pro+pencil.
Music production on one really interests me, but none of my favorite plugins (effects and instruments) that work MacOS/Windows exist for the ipad. They also don't offer enough storage at the high end Komplete 14 Ultimate is 680GB. Each of the Spitfire sample libraries is near 200GB
There are some nice sequencing apps, but again don't need the pro for that, I just send the MIDI or OSC data to a "real" computer running a "real" DAW.
You mention Komplete — is there a Kontakt player or an alternative for ipad? Or do you have a way of converting kontakt instrument into something else?
I think you can get a lot out of ipad as a plugin host, by using IDAM or something like Sonobus. A few FabFilter AUv3s and you've basically saved the cost of an iPad. Plus, the touchscreen for control.
I use my tablet about as much as my desktop and laptop. My use cases are:
(1) Personal entertainment device. When relaxing on a chair or in bed, a laptop is too unwieldy. The TV gets fought over. Pretty much all my movie / YouTube watching is done on the iPad with headphones.
(2) eBook reader. Since my iPad is always withing reach, it makes sense to store all my books on it.
(3) Stylish note-taker. Not a significant part of my use, but I occasionally have stand-up meetings, and meetings in awkward locations, where a tablet makes more sense than a laptop.
(4) Signing stuff. It is much easier to store a document to be signed in OneDrive, open it on the iPad and sign it with the stylus than it is to print-sign-scan.
I can whip out my iPad when I'm on the train to work and watch streamed or locally downloaded stuff, a laptop is way too cumbersome for that even on a semi-crowded train.
With a keyboard cover I can actually use it for messaging, emails, IM and maybe light writing. Using a stylus, I can either take freeform notes or draw stuff faster than I can with a mouse or touchpad.
And in the pre-M1 days an iPad smoked pretty much every laptop in battery performance.
So 10Gb and then as an example directly under it shows a news article with a couple small images in it lol. Personally what I'm really waiting for is 40 Gb to load my news articles.
One current day iPad killer app IMO is Procreate. It's basically a more intuitive version of Adobe Illustrator completely optimized for iPad + iPen. I bought my then girlfriend (now wife :D) an iPad for her bday in 2020 accepting the risk that we're spending a lot of money on an activity she might not stick with (digital illustration). Happy to report that I was totally wrong and we have def gotten our money's worth through the countless hours she has logged creating art. If she didn't have such a stellar app like Procreate she probably would have tried out other illustration methods. Not a guerilla marketing plug, I have no vested interest in Apple or Procreate. Just sharing an app outside my space that seems to not get much attention here on HN. You can check out my wife's art at https://instagram.com/gabjoart
And only the digital painting parts of Photoshop, not photo editing. Which isn't to say that it's not a great app! It's just not a full on replacement for Illustrator of Photoshop.
If you want an alternative to Illustrator or Photoshop, Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo are more in that vein.
I've seen occasional blog posts about X feature from desktop being added to mobile, so definitely didn't launch with feature parity, though they made a big deal about how it was based on the real desktop Photoshop codebase.
But personally I dropped Photoshop when it went subscription (last version I owned was CS5) and I've never tried the iPad version, so no personal experience to compare it.
Not even Photoshop -- Photoshop is mainly about editing, well, photos, while ProCreate is about natural-looking brush painting. Photoshop certainly has brushes, but it's not even attempting any kind of naturalism. People don't generally "paint" in Photoshop. [Edit: from comments below, I stand corrected. Guess it's just the people I know.]
I'm not sure what you call that category of app -- painting apps? Natural-media painting apps? (Although you can choose to make them quite unnatural-looking too if you want.) Fractal Design Painter (later Corel Painter) invented the category I believe, way back in 1991.
EVERYONE uses photoshop in the painting/art world. Seriously, almost everyone. It's the best app for it, and the only reason people use others in my experience is because they're either free or a one-time payment. Or, because they're painting on a tablet, where (the full) photoshop isn't available.
>while ProCreate is about natural-looking brush painting
This is also not true. People use procreate because of the simple UI, nice gestures, tailored to iPads, for a one-off payment - and because its simply just the best option available on iPads. There's no difference in what you can do with brushes, or "naturalness" between them. If anything, photoshop is better at natural-looking brush painting. If you're wanting natural looking brush painting, also check out the lesser-known Rebelle: https://www.escapemotions.com/products/rebelle/about?//produ... - which is designed to more simulate real physical paint, not just in terms of brush patterns but also mixing.
except 1/10th of the feature set. one man's bloat is another man's essential feature. as a non professional I eventually had to give up as I couldn't keep CS5 running on Mac. I am still on Intel so I guess I could run an older macOS in a VM.
Yeah agreed. I own all the affinity products and i tried really hard to use them.
They’re just not comparable on desktop to the Adobe equivalents. There’s so many basic features missing right now and their forums mention they’re not planning to add some of them.
I bought an iPad in 2020 fully thinking it’s gonna collect dust like all my other tablets over the years.
Nowadays I use it more than my laptop. With the magic keyboard and pen, it really has become the perfect portable computing device. Great for writing, great for sketching diagrams, even good for light coding (like for code samples). And it is fantastic for creating talk slides and even presenting full day workshops. Love it
Was waiting for today’s announcement to upgrade. Running into memory issues lately :D
It seems like iPad's main feature is that Apple refuses to put a touchscreen or 180degree hinge on a laptop. Laptop has a bigger screen for drawing and coding.
> It seems like iPad's main feature is that Apple refuses to put a touchscreen or 180degree hinge on a laptop.
And extra sensors. And two good cameras, front and rear, with depth & all the other stuff that iPad/iPhone cameras have that Macbook cameras don't. And make it far thinner and lighter. And better speakers. And iOS so there's a touch-focused OS on it. And a cellular connectivity option.
Dunno. For real coding I need a big monitor, a real keyboard, and a proper mouse. My laptop lives in its dock and the only time the built-in screen/keyboard get used are when I'm traveling and can't work from the home office.
Bought my wife an iPad in 2020 as well with the same fear that it will largely go unused.
She teaches at a university and would normally write copious notes on dozens of notebooks.
She got a copy of Goodnotes for iPad and started using it for her notes. 2 years later, she hasn’t touched any of her physical notes. All her study material is on iPad.
I wanted toys, could afford them, and I know myself. For example I have a Switch that was used a lot in its first month that now gets picked up maybe once a quarter for a few minutes.
Similar story here, my girlfriend uses the iPad/pencil/procreate to draw commissions for people. She absolutely loves it, went did an art degree but then went down a different career path and is now getting back into it.
In a world filled with apps that require a subscription, a persistent internet connection or filled to the brim with ads, procreate really is a breath of fresh air. Just buy it and use it like in the good old days.
Came here to +1 on the likelihood of transition thoughts and the discovery of procreate.
I also happened to gift an iPad Pro to my wife. Her daily workflow for work are apps like gdocs and buffer and the ipad handles that just fine. I think we underestimate how similar is the regular job workflow and overestimate the particular setup we need for programming / engineering.
And for digital art, she started from 0 and is now a pro at ClipStudio art and Procreate. She is working on her webtoon and has created plenty of nfts and twitter profile pictures on fiverr. I’ve started bringing an ipad to engineering lectures since it has also helped me
a great deal with note taking.
Agreed. Procreate is a masterclass in iPad app design. Everything runs so smoothly, the features are deep but the interface is still beginner-friendly, it's a joy to draw in with the Apple Pencil, and it has really good options available for exporting your work. Plus, it automatically records a timelapse of every project that you can render out at the end, which is a small feature that I absolutely adore. All that for a single-time purchase? Heck yeah.
I can’t believe it’s just a one-time $10 fee instead of the ridiculous and increasing creative cloud monthly/annual fees. I don’t know how they do it. Maybe it’ll be an annual fee one day but at least the app is worth it.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadThat's not a knock on the new version in any way, just a reflection of how much I value this particular type of device / where I feel I need more power and etc.
Dear Apple,
I want my iPad to become a Finder based full-fat macOS when it's on the Magic Keyboard and I want it to be Springboard when I take it off the Magic Keyboard.
Make it happen already.
I'm just spitballing though. The iPad probably won't make sense for most of us until it's discontinued or they add macOS to it, whichever comes first.
I'd love to get a newer iPad, but the price is bananas for me given the use case. I bought the pre-2018 model and it's still holding on but I'm going to be bummed when this one reaches the end of it's usable life due to software updates and such because I can't afford (or, justify maybe) one of the newer models.
The really cool thing about this, for those who haven't tried, is that in landscape mode the 12.9" is really really close to the same size as a two-page comic spread, so you can read them like they were intended, not one page at a time. It's a little smaller, but not much. Makes a huge difference vs. page-at-a-time reading.
(I use Chunky, which is amazing and I wish the author charged money for it or had more options to pay them than one mostly-unnecessary and really-cheap IAP, because it's really good and I never want it to go away)
I've heard Panels is decent as well.
I'm disappointed there aren't more pen-based programming experiences out there, but I can't really think of any useful ones myself either.
It's an e-ink display with paper like friction and if you really want to, you can shell into the linux system it runs on.
I have owned both a gen 1 remarkable, and an older iPad Pro. In my opinion, the remarkable is garbage in comparison. The note taking app is just so far behind. And cross platform seems it’s never going to happen.
My note taking app of choice is always: write, by stylus labs. It’s wonderful, and really expresses what I hoped pen based writing would always be. Especially the undo-wheel. For quickly scrolling back a whole word or sentence. But the real killer here is that it’s cross platform. I can move the notes to the native Linux app or the native windows app.
That having been said, I am forever annoyed that I can’t run Xcode on either Linux or my $1000+ iPad. Also, on the iPad, there are ridiculous restrictions in how you are allowed to run apps side by side in split screen.
/sigh
So the race for the good pen note taking device is still on for me.
I have hope that soon the Pine Note will take off and allow me to finally run write by stylus labs on a platform with development tools. In this case Linux.
Again, Apple could win me back by opening access to dev tools. Either in the iPad itself or cross platform on Linux/windows—or by allowing me to install macOS on the iPad.
Remarkable could win me back by opening the platform and allowing my to install write by stylus labs.
Dell or Lenovo could win the race by shipping a 2-in-1 with a current generation processor and Linux officially supported, and preferably pre installed.
But it honestly looks like pine 64 is out in front in this race.
Make no mistake. Their stuff is great. But I'm not buying something they tell me is for early adopters unless I want to write code for it and use JTAG to load that code, possibly with a handbuilt wiring harness.
Like you, I'm willing to take Pine64 at their word that they are still "crowdsourcing system level software". I am eagerly awaiting their monthly blog update/podcast. Tragically, last month's update didn't happen. So, we've all been a little in the dark.
It's linux under the cover that you can connect to if you know the password (in the settings).
There's a whole bunch of apps that you can side load into it.
https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
I'm not sure there's anything preventing you from installing write by stylus labs other than that no one appears to have ported it to the device.
I've never side loaded anything on the remarkable, but... I do own one.. so it's worth dusting it off and trying.
Thanks again for the link to the reHackable repo. Hacker News threads seem to cool off quick, but if I have any luck, I'll report back here.
[1]: http://www.styluslabs.com/faq
That said if they made a cheaper version with a 12.9" screen I would have bought that instead. I don't do anything that needs a desktop class processor.
Artists do love the performance though, people use them for video editing or large image editing with lots of layers.
Edit to add - 12.9" is also helpful for using two apps in splitscreen. Might become less important with Stage Manager, we'll see how I like that.
That's why I still think an "iPad Max" makes much more sense. Even to professionals, the iPad is ultimately a content consumption device. So, Apple ought to lean into that. Make an iPad you can love with a big screen and punchy OLED panel, while cutting back on the CPU cores to optimize for battery life and thermals. Even if they never put Stage Manager on it and ditched the LIDAR camera, I think these things would sell like hotcakes at the right price.
Think lawyers, finance, basically anyone doing “deals” is in this category. As someone with about 3 million frequent flier miles lying around I’ve seen a whole lot of them in airports.
I have one too. Big screen, thin profile can be used in an airplane seat or wherever, has a cell connection so you don’t need to fuss with wifi to send back comments on something quickly.
It’s really a great application for these things. Agreed that the processor might be overkill but also who cares, when you live on the road and shit depends on you, you just max out all the choices and press the order button.
Lower income consumers who would appreciate lower prices.
Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company at this point. The only way for them to grow another 50% from where they are today is through mass market adoption by regular people.
Or maybe these high end devices aren’t meant to drive revenue as much as they are meant to keep power users happy while focusing on other revenue streams for meaningful revenue growth.
This right here. I literally only buy them for the screen size, and because Android tablets are... really bad and largely have much worse (for my purposes) software available, even if I could find one in that size.
I never really push the processor or graphics capabilities.
The screen size is incredible for: PDF reading, drawing and art generally, a little video editing maybe, sheet music display and other music purposes, comic book reading, as a portable second screen for a Macbook (it's a very similar size to a 13" Macbook screen), portable SSH terminal, remote desktop, and yeah, watching Netflix or whatever.
But I could easily get by with the brains of a much lower-end model. However, I expect the larger, higher-quality (for faster refresh for drawing and such) screen is a big chunk of their cost to manufacture it, so I'm not sure how much cheaper such a thing would really be.
I truly don't even know what I might do with one that'd really use all that horsepower. Gaming I guess? But I don't like my games vanishing or breaking when I update an OS, so I don't game on iOS very much. Pinball and (now that it's been re-released, finally) Angry Birds. That's about it.
The main bummer with the base iPad display is that it's still using sRGB, while Apple has been using P3 gamut pretty much everywhere else since the iPhone 7. Not sure if I'd downgrade to that one, but I'd be fine with a 12.9" iPad Air.
I bet you can find used ones for much cheaper. I still love my aging 2nd generation 12.9" iPad Pro from 2017. Of course we would all love products even more if they were cheaper, law of demand and all that.
That makes the iPad fill many many use cases.
I can do about 80% of my work on my iPad
Video editing is also crazy good on an iPad Pro and iPhones.
I know that iPads are used in the architecture/construction industry for example. AutoCAD has some products that came out of the PlanGrid acquisition.
This is a notable differentiator that's easy to see and feel for iPad users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otlDSjAq2hI
> Yeah, I don't really know who Apple is hoping to sell these to. […] The iPad probably won't make sense for most of us until it's discontinued or they add macOS to it, whichever comes first.
Apple knows who they're selling to. Apple's iPad dominates the global tablet market (along with Samsung and Amazon), so there's evidence that it's made sense for its target market for some time now.
I agree. We're talking about a device that most people use to watch video though, so they're not going to really be revving it beyond 24hz.
120hz screens are great, but if I didn't play first-person shooters with my friends then I'd have no reason to use mine. Like I said, an OLED panel makes much more sense for the iPad, and arguably the Macbook Pro.
Interesting. I don't use my iPad for video much, but I'm going to assume you're right and I'm in the minority. In that case, a nice benefit for cinephiles is that 120 Hz is an integer multiple of 24 Hz, while 60 Hz is not.
Having a more powerful ipad allows more and more sophisticated tools to be made for it. Apple brings the capability and developers take advantage.
* Working on game assets using the Affinity tools (Designer and Photo)
* Second monitor for my Mac when I'm not at my desk
* Chat/videoconference tool, leaving me able to use my computer during virtual meetings
* Travel machine. I can do most of my office-y stuff on it, and use it to ssh into production things. Gitpod lets me do some light coding from there in a pinch, but if I'm planning on a lot of that I usually just carry the Macbook. Because a portable rig with two monitors is damn nice for writing code.
* Reading and annotating PDFs
* Documentation viewing while writing code
* General reading
* Using a square reader to process payments
I suspect that this will likely easily be replaced by a current Air when the time comes, but it's easily useful enough for me to want it. And when you consider that the ASUS portable monitors run in the $300-400 range, and the Wacoms are around $600, I don't feel like I'm severely overpaying.
I've thought this about every iPad model they've made, but obviously I'm wrong every time. I'm sure there are specific professionals who will find this useful, but in my guess is that most iPads are sold for casual use. As to why you would buy the higher-end model, because if you're in the market for an iPad, you probably have disposable income, you might as well get the shiniest one you can.
From the press release: > Full external display support for Stage Manager on M1 and M2 iPad models will be available in a software update later this year.
External display support is supposed to come back in an update later this year. Presumably that part will still require an M1 or newer processor.
I see the resident Apple bashers are already warming up their cannons firing a few rounds.
But perhaps we need to take a step back here for a moment....
First you need to consider the security and general platform profile of iOS which is fundamentally different from MacOS. Running MacOS would greatly weaken the iOS security profile of Apple mobile devices, and you have to remember that the devices are not just used by consumers but they are used widely in the corporate world too. iOS loaded with corporate apps is a much more attractive security footprint for corporate IT departments. Personally speaking, I very much like the tightened security footprint of iOS. I wouldn't want to run full-blown MacOS on my phone or tablet, even if I could !
Second, prior to Apple silicon, non-mobile hardware ran on Intel. So Apple were justifiably technically constrained by that fact. However, if you observe Apple today though, you can see MacOS on Apple Silicon allows you to install iPhone/iPad apps simply by downloading them from the App store as you would on an Apple mobile device. I would argue therefore that with time, we may see further blurring of boundaries in both directions.
Unless (almost) all their apps (including third-party ones) would seamlessly switch from a mouse-driven MacOS UI to a pen/finger drive iPad UI, I think most users would be disappointed with that.
As a user experience it's no less jarring than GeForce Now, XBox remote play, Steam Link, Plex, VNC apps, iSH, Blink, etc.
Please don't listen to Veliladon. Keep the iPad as it's own thing. In fact, make it more iPad-y and less Mac-y.
If I want a Mac, I'll buy a Mac.
Hard to admin my home server, program, etc on an iPad, even though it has a much faster processor and way better battery life.
I realize this is a bit of a niche usecase but apple shipping a Terminal.app for iOS/iPadOS would be a game changer.
And Apple doesn't want you running unapproved software so that's never going to happen unless macOS gets a lockdown mode (only app store apps, no terminal or Unix access, etc).
I threw a GitHub runner on mine so I can do iOS builds from it.
Cons:
- Multitasking is weak. You can put two windows next to one another as long as you want them to be in a vertical split. The "pull out" side window feature doesn't work on the home screen for no discernible reason, so if you have Things in the side app then open it from the home screen, it's no longer opened in the side app and you have to manually move it back. (append: I haven't tried Stage Manager yet; maybe it will address some of this)
- Hardware keyboard support is pretty weak. The settings app and shortcuts app are two examples of apps with bad keyboard support. The "full keyboard access" is a very strange modality: it turns tab into a chording key. There's no equivalent to "focus all elements" as there is on desktop, so for example if I press tab from this text box, the "reply button" is not selected; the search at the bottom of the page is.
- Web access is a must. Individual apps might provide offline support, but many have sub-par sync systems, where you'll discovered that your offline files have helpfully been completely deleted and require resyncing, but since you're already on the plane by that point you're out of luck.
All in all: works great as an expensive dumb terminal.
I also use it for presentations, sketch out designs and architecture, etc, but it's harder to clean up documents on the iPad because the editing on it is awkward compared do a laptop. For certain things diction works, but just copying and pasting a couple of rows in excel (or any spreadsheet like thing) is just really bad.
That said, the tool you have with you is the best tool, and it's really portable. It's 7 years old at this point and still going strong. It won't use a bunch of the new features in 16, but since I don't use those anyway I don't care.
If you want to test out an iPad, pick up a 1st or 2nd gen iPad Pro. I have three of them around the house (including mine) and the other two get used all the time for video/games/browsing.
If you want to infinitely scroll, the iPad is unparalleled. It is great for reading and watching. I like it as a game device. It is great for reading news and I enjoy apple's news widgets. Kindle works well. If you want to consume, the iPad is an amazing tool for consumption.
Additionally in the last year, apple made it really easy to use your iPad as a second screen, either as an iPad or as a literal second screen for your macbook. I found myself doing that more and more.
I bought the apple pencil thinking it can't possibly be worth the money, but it is an enjoyable device to use. Writing text on an iPad is more gimmick than feature (for me), but I find it a pleasurable way to scroll or navigate apps.
That being said, once you want to do a task with a keyboard, there is no replacing a laptop. The iPad is also locked down (no terminal, only safari) such that a laptop is still necessary. The iPad is still very much a luxury device and could not stand on its own. Phones and laptops both have features that the iPad does not have that make them necessary. The iPad offers nothing that makes it necessary unless you consider an ancillary screen for your laptop necessary.
So seems about right.
My M2 air is as thick as my iPad ...
Having said that it is also MUCH heavier (relative to what I'd like an iPad to be) and has a noticeably bigger screen.
Not sure how fast those gaps get closed.
I feel like this is exactly what they want. My only question is how much i'll be able to modify my laptop long term. Ie i run Nixpkgs (ie the package system from NixOS) on my laptop. The day i can't modify my Mac OS to my liking is the day i stop buying their laptops.
I do think there's a market for people who want laptops that have the lockdown of phones. Where less things can go wrong because you can't change a lot.
That was my mentality too. For me, the cutoff came when Catalina dropped (and I couldn't run 32-bit libraries, even after modding MacOS). Nix was the last thing keeping my sanity together when I last used MacOS. When they pull the plug on that, it's going to be a sad day...
> I do think there's a market for people who want laptops that have the lockdown of phones. Where less things can go wrong because you can't change a lot.
I agree. That's a software problem though, not a hardware problem. Much like the situation on iPhone, Apple could easily offer a "pro mode" or "developer mode" that offers extended functionality while disabling certain high-security features.
If MacBook Air is a browser machine, then it's already happened. If it's a creative work machine, then well, it's close, but you still probably have a some kind of PC nearby.
If it's a developer machine, then the best iPad can do is being a ssh terminal or VSCode browser. A superb terminal, I use it every day to work because I don't have personal laptop.
Keep buying Apple laptops, got it. I know that a large number of people keep asking for laptop with touchscreen, but this is one design decision where I whole heartedly with Apple. Touchscreen on laptops make no sense. The use case for a touchscreen is significantly different from a laptop that it makes sense to have two classes of devices.
Then again, I don't really get the large number of iPads sold either. It seems like an extremely niche devices which would only find a use case in certain types of industry.
The issue with the Touch Bar is the same, that's not a professional feature, or even particular useful. Apple knows this, because you can't buy a magic keyboard with the Touch Bar. If it was useful, the Touch Bar would also appear on the those and it doesn't. I'd love to know how many MacBook Pros are sold with and without the Touch Bar.
I installed OS X on my old Asus Zenbook and the touchscreen still functioned... but yeah not once did I ever think "wow I want to apply my fingers to my laptop screen instead of using the large precise touch surface within easier reach" besides for novelty
Apple could let customers launch iPad apps on their Macs and use a touchscreen. But they don't, because they'd rather sell you two devices. It's silly, artificial market segmentation.
It was pretty neat, but I can tell you from experience that coding using handwriting recognition isn't a great experience :)
[1] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nec-versa-litepad-tablet-pc-vlp...
Safari history has been broken for something like 4-5 years. About 1% of time back button will take you one step too far (i.e. will show your home page instead of google serp)
It'd be like me calling McDonald's restaurant-class because they could suddenly give you a plate. Sure, it's a component, but the porcelain isn't why I go to a restaurant, it's to have a qualified cook doing things with his expertise.
For example, PineTab runs full desktop GNU/Linux.
- It sits on my lap with the screen sitting upright without the need for a case to sit it upright - I prefer using a keyboard over a touch screen for desktop like applications and browsing - The trackpad being on my lap or directly in front of me is more ergonomically friendly than having to reach forward to touch the screen
If I was to need to buy another laptop, it would be another Macbook over an iPad.
I'm hoping the rumored new laptops will also support 6E.
For those that don't know, Wifi-6E uses the 6Ghz band, and I anticipate it will be very helpful in crowded residential environments where lots of Wifi APs are all landing on the same few 2.4 and 5Ghz channels.
"Wifi 7: 10 Terrabyte/sec transfer speeds" *yawn*
"Wifi 7: Connects in 500 ms, latency 20 ms, tri-band fallover for 5-nines reliability" *Opens checkbook*
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=simultaneous+dual+band
And I believe that higher bandwidth is the solution to better reliability and latency when you've got lots of devices sharing the same router, or other interference. Isn't that how digital radio works?
The place where the slowness is most noticeable on iPad is when I want to reconnect it to my iPhone's hotspot. I need to reconnect many times per day because the iPhone turns off the hotspot when its unused for 90 seconds to save battery, and this behavior infuriatingly cannot be disabled.
Other OSs don't do that, so it seems like it takes a longer time.
> The main purpose of scan is to update/confirm the available WiFi SSID list around the user’s device. There are two types of scan: active scan and passive scan [3]. The active scan is triggered periodically: the mobile device first broadcasts the probe requests, and surrounding APs after hearing the probe requests will reply probe response packets, containing information such as the supporting physical rate. The mobile device will add the SSID of the AP into the candidate list, if it finds that the AP is compatible. In the passive scan, the list of available SSIDs can be updated by beacon packets broadcasted by APs periodically, e.g., every 100ms [4].
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02528v1.pdf
In any case, a good protocol would have random wait times that are still (in expectation) of order the rate at which bits are communicated, not some human timescale.
Relatedly: When I turn off a network by pulling the plug on a router, it takes many seconds for this to be reflected in the list of available networks on my Macbook. I don't think there's a good reason for it to be like this.
On the surface, this seems like a negative, but if you're in a crowded apartment building, it can actually be a major benefit. Even if a bunch of your neighbors end up using it on the same channel as you, you won't experience as much interference because the walls will attenuate their signals.
Of course, a single AP might not reliably cover your entire home in 6ghz, but you can always fall back to 2.4 and 5ghz and/or get more APs.
Additionally, WiFi 6 (and 6e) is better in general at detecting neighboring networks across all frequency bands and reducing interference automatically.
8 in a single small home is absurdly excessive. My home is more than twice that size and I only have a single AP (although I have been considering adding 1-2 more.)
My thinkpad tablets are thick, hot, and the battery lasts around 3 hours of light use.
But, It does make me salty that an M2 iPad can't run Xcode. I wish they would figure that out as it would greatly streamline my setup.
I think HN forgets the 'pros' using the iPad Pros are video, photography, visual-arts and music professionals.
I'm as disappointed as the next dev on HN that iPadOS still doesn't allow me to run a full version of Xcode. But then I remember there are perfectly good laptops for that, and I'm not the target audience for these devices
I could see maybe using it at the right type of session to quickly review images on a larger screen, but the last time I looked into it there wasn’t a super great way of doing that. Maybe I could cull photos on my iPad but unless I transfer for the photos to it and then back off I’d need to work over my network and that’d probably be slow…
Everything relating to moving files, SD cards, etc. is just a hassle in Apple tablet/phone world. Ironically, a PC just works.
I disagree. A gesture-based workflow won't replace Pro Tools' keyboard shortcuts, unfortunately.
After using my tablet as a second screen for production, photo editing, CADing, and coding, it's become woefully apparent that the mouse - a tiny singular cursor - is an inferior grandfather to an interface that _also_ supports multitouch, and the only thing holding tablets back is software. Obsidian is a good example of a mobile app that has parity with its desktop version in both maintaining its keyboard shortcuts but also enabling touch interactions closer to the affordances of physical notes.
Let's check in again in a few device generations.
The existing iPads were already the best devices for this kind of thing, but faster is always better.
I still find it sad that:
a) Apple restricts iPad OS so much, that it's difficult to make good use of that fantastic hardware. It feels weird that people ask questions like "what can I actually use that power for?"
b) Companies do not ship better iPad apps. At this point, Fusion 360 would work better on this M2 iPad than on most PC machines, but we only get a half-baked "viewer" thing which doesn't really do anything useful.
Doesn't faster CPU tend to imply potentially better battery life?
But in this case the M2 has efficiency improvements, so yes.
This does get slower for some pathological PDFs, which is why an even faster CPU would help.
Really, I can't think of a ton of uses for desktop/laptop hardware this powerful. And I don't do any of them, gaming aside (I have a mediocre Windows PC for that, and even that is often using only a fraction of its power for gaming).
The one and only time I've given my m1 Air a real workout is playing with one of those AI art generators, but it's not like that was something I needed to do, or I'd have felt like I was really missing out if I hadn't done it. I did it because I could and it was low-effort.
Faster compiling is nice I guess. That's... it.
Oh, there are plenty — for one, I would really like to have a good CAD/CAM application. Parametric, history-based, like Fusion 360 or SolidWorks. There is Shapr3D which is absolutely amazing and shows what the hardware is capable of (take a look at the demo videos), but nothing I can use for actual work.
These kinds of apps need both a reasonable GPU for rendering and a really good CPU for computing constraints in sketches, and then for recomputing solids.
Unfortunately, Fusion 360 being an Autodesk product, we aren't even graced with an Apple Silicon version on the Mac yet, even though it's been what, two years since Apple Silicon is out? The application is a slow pig, where usability comes last. So I guess I can keep on dreaming.
Or take electronics CAD — having KiCAD on an iPad would be amazing.
But I don't think it's weird that people struggle to come up with ways to really use super-powerful hardware, because most folks don't do (and don't want to do) much of the above except maybe gaming, and most people who do game don't do it—or at least not in a way that's taxing on the hardware—on all the kinds of devices they own.
The cool stuff lots and lots of people actually use tends to end up in dedicated hardware or paths, like video codecs and image processing and face recognition and all that, not mainly processed by the general CPU or graphics power of their platforms.
The crux of all this is having the option to run the software you want on the hardware you own. No, I don't do 3D modelling, CAD, scientific simulation or gaming on a daily basis. But I do use that software sometimes, and a device that excludes the possibility of running any of them doesn't sound fun or "limitless" to me. It all leads to the feeling that the iPad is a Disney-fied version of a professional workflow.
Each page is ~5000x7000px with dozens of layers including many effects and even 3D models. Even my 2018 iPad Pro breezes through this workflow. With the pencil, it feels like exactly the right device for what I'm doing.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 8)
Overall, this looks like it is clearly aimed at creators. I have the 2018 Pro with Magic Keyboard and have zero interest in upgrading to this model. Honestly I almost wish I could trade my Pro for a Mini, since it's more pocket-able, and I mainly use my Pro for demoing my startup's technology.
I don't think I could do that now but there seems to be a sizable crowd who works that way and maybe is the future.
Yeah, it requires a new ipad.
I'm a bit salty, not gonna lie. This has been basic on wacoms forever.
I wish they'd just ship macOS as an "app" on their iPads
Without the pencil it's $2148.
If I get a 1TB 13 Inch M2 Macbook (16GB ram) it's 1899.
I have been avoiding getting an iPad because it can't run xCode, and it's cheaper for me to get the laptop.
Sure, some people are buying both, but I'm sure there are many like me that aren't because of this exact trade off.
Especially at the scale in which iPad having developer tools could ostensibly cannibalize Mac sales — there's no way this would be a factor in the existence of those tools.
The main problem, I think, is most development tools require a relatively low-level of operating system access that Apple has not figured out a way to do given what they want iOS/iPadOS to "be".
My suspicion is they'll eventually find a way to do containers in a manner that's relatively "safe", and they'll lean on Cloud-based build tools that move the hard work off device.
I also have been using a 13” mac for years, so “cramped screen” doesn’t really apply to me on a 12.9” iPad pro’s XDR. It is more than capable, and I would hopefully be able to plug it into my external monitor at home.
> The entirety of iPadOS would need to be overhauled in order for it to be conducive for developer work
I disagree. I used an iPad for sysadmin, datascience, some math, and some web dev. Most of the pain comes from arbitrary restrictions Apple places on iPads. (I’d imagine it’ll get more painful as my eyes worsen.)
The appeal is simple: Being able to develop with whatever device you have on you. A laptop beats a tablet, a tablet beats a phone, and a phone beats pencil and paper.
As it stands I have absolutely no interest. It's generous to describe "Stage Manager" as a gimmick.
I know there's basically no chance I'll be able to run Emacs or VS Code on this portable little device any time soon, but if I could, it'd be my main device by a long way. There's no hardware limitation preventing it, just artificial restrictions on a "pro" device.
I have had the FOSS version of Gitpods working well on my iPad mini.. if that helps.
I know it's not local, and we're mainly talking about using the local power at our finger-tips.. but, it's an option.
Seems like display technology has matured and reached an equilibrium pricing state if even Apple can't justify the cost of investing in producing the fancier displays in a second size.
I have an iPad Pro with A15, and it holds battery better than my M1 MacBook Air on video calls. They are both great though, much better than any x64 devices I have ever had.
It works perfectly fine. Only main difference is that, in landscape mode, instead of people seeing you look slightly down instead of into the camera (like laptops), people see you look slightly left instead of into the camera.
99% of people seeing your image in the call won't notice or care. Especially when things like your lighting setup make most of the difference that people do notice, which has nothing to do with the camera you're using.
I use my iPad for video calls (Zoom) all the freaking time and it's fine, but perhaps that's because i have it in the tall orientation so the camera aligns.
Being a bit off-center is the least of the problems with video calls.
Now, I had joined also from my tablet but samsung put the camera in the center when in landscape mode and got no such remarks and I was just smiling
Is there some benefit to using this over a laptop?
If it was a screen-only version of my MBA M1 I could definitely ditch the MBA and use an iPad exclusively, even if it required attaching a keyboard sometimes. The lacking software still makes it much more of a luxury to me than something to actually replace my use cases for a portable computer... I could afford one but see absolutely no usage given that my MBA is already extremely portable and works like I expect.
It’s the perfect thing to take travelling. And on the work side, the pen is astonishingly good as is the app ecosystem.
It also functions as a second screen for a macbook.
Is it necessary? No. Have I spent money in worse? Absolutely.
A tablet is integrated into my daily routine to a degree a laptop will never be.
The only great use-case I've seen for the pro is 2d digital art. I have a few artist friends who love the pro+pencil.
Music production on one really interests me, but none of my favorite plugins (effects and instruments) that work MacOS/Windows exist for the ipad. They also don't offer enough storage at the high end Komplete 14 Ultimate is 680GB. Each of the Spitfire sample libraries is near 200GB
There are some nice sequencing apps, but again don't need the pro for that, I just send the MIDI or OSC data to a "real" computer running a "real" DAW.
I think you can get a lot out of ipad as a plugin host, by using IDAM or something like Sonobus. A few FabFilter AUv3s and you've basically saved the cost of an iPad. Plus, the touchscreen for control.
(1) Personal entertainment device. When relaxing on a chair or in bed, a laptop is too unwieldy. The TV gets fought over. Pretty much all my movie / YouTube watching is done on the iPad with headphones.
(2) eBook reader. Since my iPad is always withing reach, it makes sense to store all my books on it.
(3) Stylish note-taker. Not a significant part of my use, but I occasionally have stand-up meetings, and meetings in awkward locations, where a tablet makes more sense than a laptop.
(4) Signing stuff. It is much easier to store a document to be signed in OneDrive, open it on the iPad and sign it with the stylus than it is to print-sign-scan.
With a keyboard cover I can actually use it for messaging, emails, IM and maybe light writing. Using a stylus, I can either take freeform notes or draw stuff faster than I can with a mouse or touchpad.
And in the pre-M1 days an iPad smoked pretty much every laptop in battery performance.
> Wi‑Fi 6E and 5G
So 10Gb and then as an example directly under it shows a news article with a couple small images in it lol. Personally what I'm really waiting for is 40 Gb to load my news articles.
I think you meant to or should compare it to Photoshop
If you want an alternative to Illustrator or Photoshop, Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo are more in that vein.
But personally I dropped Photoshop when it went subscription (last version I owned was CS5) and I've never tried the iPad version, so no personal experience to compare it.
I'm not sure what you call that category of app -- painting apps? Natural-media painting apps? (Although you can choose to make them quite unnatural-looking too if you want.) Fractal Design Painter (later Corel Painter) invented the category I believe, way back in 1991.
From illustrators to matte painters, photoshop is probably the most common painting app you’ll find.
Photoshop has an old, strong brand, allthe name is a bit anachronistic, but it has grown to be a product for all 2D visual art.
>People don't generally paint in photoshop
EVERYONE uses photoshop in the painting/art world. Seriously, almost everyone. It's the best app for it, and the only reason people use others in my experience is because they're either free or a one-time payment. Or, because they're painting on a tablet, where (the full) photoshop isn't available.
>while ProCreate is about natural-looking brush painting
This is also not true. People use procreate because of the simple UI, nice gestures, tailored to iPads, for a one-off payment - and because its simply just the best option available on iPads. There's no difference in what you can do with brushes, or "naturalness" between them. If anything, photoshop is better at natural-looking brush painting. If you're wanting natural looking brush painting, also check out the lesser-known Rebelle: https://www.escapemotions.com/products/rebelle/about?//produ... - which is designed to more simulate real physical paint, not just in terms of brush patterns but also mixing.
Edit: I see Rebelle is quite a bit like Paint. Shame they tell fibs about being “first” to emulate physical colour mixing. Alas, not iPadOS.
By the way, if anyone is interested in a vector drawing app, I highly recommend Concepts.
They’re just not comparable on desktop to the Adobe equivalents. There’s so many basic features missing right now and their forums mention they’re not planning to add some of them.
Had to go back to Adobe
Nowadays I use it more than my laptop. With the magic keyboard and pen, it really has become the perfect portable computing device. Great for writing, great for sketching diagrams, even good for light coding (like for code samples). And it is fantastic for creating talk slides and even presenting full day workshops. Love it
Was waiting for today’s announcement to upgrade. Running into memory issues lately :D
And extra sensors. And two good cameras, front and rear, with depth & all the other stuff that iPad/iPhone cameras have that Macbook cameras don't. And make it far thinner and lighter. And better speakers. And iOS so there's a touch-focused OS on it. And a cellular connectivity option.
She teaches at a university and would normally write copious notes on dozens of notebooks.
She got a copy of Goodnotes for iPad and started using it for her notes. 2 years later, she hasn’t touched any of her physical notes. All her study material is on iPad.
Very happy with the purchase.
In a world filled with apps that require a subscription, a persistent internet connection or filled to the brim with ads, procreate really is a breath of fresh air. Just buy it and use it like in the good old days.
I also happened to gift an iPad Pro to my wife. Her daily workflow for work are apps like gdocs and buffer and the ipad handles that just fine. I think we underestimate how similar is the regular job workflow and overestimate the particular setup we need for programming / engineering.
And for digital art, she started from 0 and is now a pro at ClipStudio art and Procreate. She is working on her webtoon and has created plenty of nfts and twitter profile pictures on fiverr. I’ve started bringing an ipad to engineering lectures since it has also helped me a great deal with note taking.
I’ll send her your wife’s insta, here is her’s: https://www.instagram.com/yanora_draws/
Last gen: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212527
This gen, right on the product page: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/