I skimmed through the article but didn’t find mention of one glaring deficiency in iPadOS — it still doesn’t support multiple users and multiuser switching, even though the hardware is capable of it (and exceeds the capacity of many Macs before it). I decided several years ago that I’m not buying another iPad until this is sorted out by iPadOS.
I think of iPhones as personal devices, where each person may have their own. But iPads are more likely to be shared for personal use in families. The fact that each person using it cannot have their own user profiles, app data, etc., is a huge drawback. Apple has supported this for a long time (though probably not in the best way) for education, but it’s not available to others. Even tvOS supports switching between user profiles quickly.
Apple enforcing the idea that iPad (with iPadOS) should also be a personal device — one device per person — makes the user experience quite poor.
Like you mentioned, they already have implement support for multiple users on an iPad. But they require that you use mobile device management (MDM) and Managed Apple IDs.
So basically only schools or businesses can use the feature. It’s really galling that the feature is already implemented but they won’t give it to us because of an obvious attempt at a money grab.
Yes, but you can’t do multi user without Managed Apple IDs, which requires a DUNS number last I checked. And that’s painful to do if you aren’t really a business.
My memory of doing this is rusty, but I believe you can do this as a "civilian" with the Classroom app and without Managed Apple IDs. Somebody correct me with a citation if I am wrong.
A lot of people are saying they do it just to sell more iPads, but I'm skeptical. I bet they have research telling them only a small percentage of customers want multi-user sharing.
Every single person with kids either wants this, or just doesn't know they want it. That is not a small market. Do you want your kid to have access to your email, saved credentials and saved payment cards? No.
You want it if you yourself use the iPad for more than just watching Netflix, and you ever hand your iPad to your child without locking them into a single app using that feature.
Otherwise, they can do things like delete incoming chat messages you haven't yet read, delete any/all notes/photos/ etc, and a hundred similar things — and in many cases, it's easy to do accidentally.
Usually when that's invoked with Apple, it's a misapplication of the general principle of simplicity, used to create a blanket ban against features desired by a superminority.
Even just given TFA, we can see that's not how Apple operates in practice, and in context, TFA describes in detail of how Apple says it wants to flesh out more of these type of features for years on iPad, and it hasn't.
Most damning: _the feature exists_. But obscured. It ain't about simplicity.
As the poster before you said, they have already built it. They have already solved those issues. They only offer the solution to schools and big organisations that use their management software to control lots of devices.
A company that is making 45% net margin, mostly from their hardware sales (revenue from associated services is very dependent on the limitations they put in, on purpose); is not trying to make even more profit.
Like Apple sole focus in the last 10 years has been on insuring profit growth at all cost, annoying many customers in the process.
There is something particularly immoral about companies like Nintendo/Disney/Apple that have some sort of mind-control over their customers.
I think outsiders see this. There is something a bit 'off' about the loyalty of the customers. The other day I saw a family wear micky mouse ears in public. Someone else can define the difference between fandom and mental illness.
Sometimes they seem so biased that I can't believe the company apologists are even real humans with freedom of will.
They argue for things that are counter to their own interests. It's difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion that I'm arguing with AI or a paid employee.
The existence of these people proves that there is something fundamentally different between my life experience and theirs. I must be missing a lot of context for why they act like they do.
Apple and Tesla are unique in the levels of brandd zealotry they seem to induce. Nintendo users for example are unlikely to only ever use a Nintendo device...they may own other consoles or play other games on a computer.
Apple and Tesla users tend to only own and use those devices to the exclusion of everything else, which feeds the myopia.
I’d have to agree. I see the use case for wanting to share with your small child. It sure seems to me like buying the cheapest iPad is the solution most people go for. Like the gateway drug before a parent feels the kid can handle a phone.
Indeed I have no interest in multi-user iPad. I have one, my wife has one, my daughter has one. Sharing them just wouldn’t get us anything.
Would some people want it, sure, but features aren’t free to add or maintain.
iPhone mini showed how much vocal Internet commenters (don’t) represent the actual user base. Commenters said they wanted a smaller iPhone. Then it sold poorly. And I say this as I write this on an iPhone 13 mini.
I suspect the multi-user iOS, right along with the people complaining that iOS is underpowered generally, is the same phenomenon at work.
I know that iPads aren't a necessity of life, but your post reads as "I have enough money to buy 3 iPads, so I don't care about families that want to share a single one to save money"
Or they can buy 3 cheaper Android tablets. Or they can buy 1 Android tablet, seeing as Android supports multiple users. So no, I really don’t care about families that would rather whine about Apple than exercise some agency and buy other products that already have the features they claim they want.
Welcome to being a grown-up. You have to pick from available products and decide what’s important. If you want multi-user support, don’t buy an ipad.
There are non-tablet alternatives. Get a laptop. Get a Chromebook. Both support multiple users. Both can be cheaper than an iPad.
Indeed maybe the Android tablets “suck” because Google and those manufacturers are busy adding things people don’t want, like, ahem, multi-user support, while maybe Apple products are better because they are focused and don’t have the kitchen sink.
Android tablets absolutely don't suck if you put as much money in them as you would in an Apple one. It is just that people have been convinced by marketing and by people like you (believers) that they suck at any price and that if you have to put as much money, you better get an Apple one anyway, which is just plain wrong.
You seem to conveniently forget that the reason iPad got so much traction is because they launched at a price that was very competitive. It was state-of-the-art technology and even if you wanted to put more money there wasn't much better to be had.
Now you are somewhat right telling people to not buy an iPad, but they also have the right to complain about the state of things, particularly since switching OS is an expensive (have to rebuy all the software, possibility content held captive in the "Store") and time consuming (need to figure out how to transfer everything and learn new stuff). This is especially true since Apple has made this part very difficult for obvious reasons.
If you relied on their messaging platform there is just no other way than to export and archive, losing all continuity and if you relied on their office suite there is no other way than to export and recreate any files in a competitor software. This problem exists in other parts of this industry but it's rarely as bad as with Apple...
And there is the fact that since their hardware doesn't support any other OS, telling people to just change hardware that is still in good shape, that should be more than sufficient for their need is just stupid peak consumerism. "It's fine, you just need to re-buy all the things, and then it works "
So, people complain against their disgusting behavior and ask for better solutions for the money they spent, as they should. You don't have more legitimacy telling people to just chose another vendor no matter how you feel...
You've just described capitalism. Consume accordingly.
Edit: It seems people are offended. I didn't mean to. Let me rephrase: Apple's fiduciary responsibility is to make money for its shareholders. If you are not in favor of this, pick different products (slowly migrating back to Linux, in my case.)
I think the question isn't so much whether Apple users want multiuser support. Rather the question is whether Apple wants customers who can't afford to buy one of each sort of device for each family member.
At a previous company, we rotated secondary (more portable) devices around the oncall rotation. I think we used a macbook air, and some fancy portable Windows netbook. Now that iPads exist, and they're super portable, I can imagine that they'd be great for oncall. That being said, I wouldn't want my settings, say in the terminal for example, to affect mine. Although MDM is a solution, at the scale of the ~50 person company, we didn't have anything as the such, nor the capabilities, time, or money to figure it out.
I rock it and they can pry it off my cold dead hands…
The button works every time, unlike Face ID which is sometimes hit / miss for me.
Camera is quite good. Not the latest / greatest but honestly, who cares? Most people believe they are artists that are shooting the next masterpiece, yet most pictures are a)never seen ever again or b) a poor attempt of a picture already taken 20 million times - you are not that special as Apple makes us believe.
Pocketable, decent battery, does not force me to grip it forcing my finger joints. Screen is small, yes, but an upside to remember to put my phone in my pocket more and live the world more. I have a laptop and a tablet for longer sessions.
The iPhone mini was so crippled it was a waste of money. When I say I want a smaller phone, I mean I want a smaller version of the same phone. Not one with shitty components and artificially disabled hardware.
I'm going to keep using mine for as long as I can, and just hope that Apple releases another one by the time I need a new phone.
"shitty components and artificially disabled hardware" is one way to look at it. I think "significantly smaller battery and scaled accordingly" is more accurate, personally.
I'm an undemanding phone user. I take pictures, catch rides, use the map, take calls, listen to stuff. I don't hang out on my phone. So I want a phone that's as small as it reasonably can be, it fits more places and I notice it less.
However, I also want the battery to last a full day. The only way I'm going to get that is if the phone is somewhat less powerful than a phone running the same OS and apps with a rather larger battery. This is a tradeoff I am comfortable with, and was able to figure out from first principles when getting the 12 mini (and now the 13).
It's fine to want a phone which is small like the mini, as powerful as the base model, and which lasts just as long on a charge. But I don't see how any company could deliver that phone.
yes, today. When it came out, it was missing some features that were enabled in the bigger models. I don't remember specifics, so I can't be more helpful here.
I'm fairly sure you're conflating the mini with the base model, and comparing it to the Pro. The Pro always has features which the base model lacks.
I don't remember there being any features, ever, which the mini was missing and the base model iPhone had. Might have missed it, but I'm going to need to see a link.
I ended up basically disabling all of my chat app notifications— there's enough sensitive stuff in there and I don't want some spicy meme popping up when my kid is looking over my shoulder or using my phone to play a game, or worse it's being Carplay-mirrored.
Guided access covers some of that, but I really don't think it's the whole story. Rather than locking everything to a single app, I'd rather something more like a guest session that sees all the apps, just all of them in a logged-out state... no messages, no emails, no calendar, no banking info, no history for Google Maps or open tabs/autocomplete in the browser, none of it.
But perhaps that feature is really just a subset of the broader users/profiles request that is being made here, because then I could have separate users for "primary" and "family" on my phone, and the "family" user would still enjoy continuity from session to session (game progress, previously visited YouTube videos, whatever) but in a separate universe from the continuity of the primary user.
The implication of "I wish I could hand my iPad to..." is that the person receiving the iPad would be able to use it, not just physically hold onto it.
I think that's too granular and is dependent on the apps offering Face ID as a secondary-layer authentication flow -- I think OP is suggesting an entirely different user profile that doesn't even have the same applications that the original (save for the default iPadOS apps, and even those should be logged out from your Apple ID). The cognitive overhead of "did I make sure to enable Face ID on x,y,z apps so that I can pass around my iPad without worrying about any personal data being accessible" is too high for spontaneous + casual device sharing.
Example:
"Hey uncle ping00, can I use your iPad real quick to watch something?"
"Sure nephew, <switches profile to Guest ,and hands it over> go nuts"
Guided access is for restricting access to one app. Not great for a multiuser experience. The AppleTV gets it right in a lot of ways but an iPad with faceID and/or fingerprint sensor could instantly recognize a given user and have their profile ready
Yes and no, you can limit people to one app but I would say it's too clunky to initiate and not flexible enough to really let someone borrow your tablet for a few minutes.
> Even tvOS supports switching between user profiles quickly.
I wonder if somebody had to justify that in an internal meeting at some point? "Most TVs have multiple HDMI ports, wouldn't it be only fair to expect families to buy one Apple TV per–"...
I think it’s a big unaddressed problem for Apple that they have an Apple TV device, an Apple TV app, an Apple TV service, and an Apple TV Plus service.
What is the linguistic equivalent to skeuomorphism? Anachronism?
Apple using "TV" all over the place is like plastering their apps with 3.5" floppy or 120mm optical disks, or prepending anything user-specific with "My ".
At least to me, TV is a service/abstract concept as much as a device (but then again, I didn't grow up speaking English, and my native language has a different word for the service and the device).
So if there's a thing that can show me a bunch of TV serials and movies, why not call that TV?
I suppose you could be nitpicky and say "TV means linear broadcast or cable TV, not VOD"; it should be called (Apple) VCR" – but now we're really talking outdated technologies :)
Once upon a time there was a company who could enter a market with a product and service offering with relatively novel names, like say iPod and iTunes. As time went on some lights dimmed and they just slapped a lowercase I on a generic term. This device became such a success maybe they thought having a new word for a thing wasn’t important anymore. The I was played out so they used their company name instead. Then to avoid complete boredom they added suffixes of pro, plus and Xtreme.
Having a piece of hardware called an Apple TV, with a TV app, and a "premium" plus service doesn't strike me as a problem. Except perhaps that the Apple TV isn't a TV, which is kind of funny, but I can't think of a better product name and it's not something of real concern to me.
Exactly: It's an app you watch TV in, similarly to how the Camera app is an app you take photos with, despite the app not physically containing a camera obscura :)
To be fair, the app is just called "TV", and Apple TV is only the device, i.e. I'm not aware of any service called that.
As an occasional Chromecast (with Google TV) (4K) (running Android TV) user, I think Google wins this round of botched branding.
Edit: Of course it makes sense to clarify the app's name as "Apple TV", similarly to "Apple Podcasts" or "Apple Calendar", but that doesn't mean that's its official name.
Sure, Apple could have named it something memorable and unambigous like "CouchPotato" or "Bingetime" or whatnot, but that sounds more like early 2000s Apple from a branding point of view.
I just fired up my AppleTV4k, navigated to my Apple TV app, so that I could view my AppleTV+ service.
I'm not really sure what you're on about, but all of the names you boldly claimed are not named what you say they are named. Right there on the app is the apple logo in front of the letters TV, aka AppleTV. Launching that app in the left hand menu, it clearly states Apple TV+ as an option. The logo on the device is the same as the logo on the app. So if you're stipulating it is read as Apple TV for the device, why would it also not be read the same way for the app using the exact same logo?
> Right there on the app is the apple logo in front of the letters TV, aka AppleTV.
> So if you're stipulating it is read as Apple TV for the device, why would it also not be read the same way for the app using the exact same logo?
The logo of WhatsApp is a chat bubble containing a phone handset, yet it's not called "Chat bubble containing a phone handset WhatsApp".
Of course it can make sense to call the app "Apple TV", to disambiguate it from e.g. the Netflix app on an iPhone. I'm just saying that I don't think that that is its official name, and I also don't think this is very confusing in practice.
Netflix is also both an app and a company! Just say "Apple TV app" or "Apple TV device" if you want to disambiguate them?
> Launching that app in the left hand menu, it clearly states Apple TV+ as an option.
I never claimed that there was no service called "Apple TV+".
I was referring to Apple TV, not Apple TV+, specifically in response to:
> I think it’s a big unaddressed problem for Apple that they have an Apple TV device, an Apple TV app, an Apple TV service, and an Apple TV Plus service.
There's at least one too many "Apple TV x"s in that list, is my point. Apple TV is a device; (Apple) TV is also an app. The streaming service is called Apple TV+.
> Launching that app in the left hand menu, it clearly states Apple TV+ as an option. [...] You are now aware. That's all I was doing. I never said you never said blah blah blah
What? I've been using Apple TV+ for years. Of course they're promoting their own streaming content service in their own app!
Simpler than them being "on about": I'm guessing the app label on iPhone is TV. Dunno though and cant confirm.
To be fair, they're blatantly wrong about the Google branding. They went ahead and did the Apple thing, it's all Google TV as far as consumer branding.
Google TV is an app/portal/service (with somewhat ill-defined boundaries, but I generally like it on my Chromecast, as it's able to pull in recommendations from basically all available sources, unlike Apple TV, which seems to have some feud with at least Netflix); the Chromecast with Google TV is the physical device I can plug into my TV to make it display Google TV.
The streaming protocol is currently called "Google Cast", as far as I can tell.
The complaint about branding is Google has Chromecast, Google TV, Android TV, YouTube TV and it’s really not obvious which does what from the names. IMO if they swapped YouTube TV for YouTube Cable TV then suddenly it’s more obvious what’s going on even if the name’s dumb.
Similarly Chrome is their web browser so why call the physical device Chromecast? It kind of works because on of its less popular features also uses Chrome so that reinforces the name for anyone who uses it this way, but that’s a real stretch now days.
Related to that: The protocol that these (and many third-party devices) speak is called "Google Cast", yet Google refers to third-party devices speaking that protocol as "Chromecast built-in"...
> Similarly Chrome is their web browser so why call the physical device Chromecast?
I suppose it originally made sense, given that the physical Chromecast device only worked with Google Chrome, and in its early days even was used for tab mirroring (until most video sites started integrating the protocol natively). Wanting to benefit from the (at the time quite positive) brand perception of "Google Chrome" probably plays an even bigger part.
But at this point it seems like a weird historical leftover.
Who said it's trademarked? Apple has apps on macOS named "Photos" and "Calendar." There's apps on iOS named "Camera" and "Notes." It's not at all crazy to have one called "TV."
I definitely also say "Apple TV app", but I'm just not convinced there officially is such a service! (Not sure if that's more a statement about me or Apple's marketing/branding department.)
There used to be iTunes, where you could buy and rent movies. Then Apple split that app into its components "Music" (including purchased music as well as the subscription service called Apple Music), "TV" (including movie rentals, purchases, and the subscription service "Apple TV+") and "Podcasts".
Since these three things are quite generically named, of course it makes sense to practically refer to them as "Apple Podcasts" etc., and Apple's marketing department should have seen that need coming, but in-ecosystem, it does align somewhat nicely with other apps called Calendar, Mail etc, and when it's not clear from context, just add "Apple" in front (and maybe "app" at the end), and everybody will know what you're talking about.
It's a UI/UX thing - Apple decided that iPads are single-user devices and login switching is too complicated. That's apple for you. Also, you still can't install runtime environments, making the iPad Pro a poor laptop substitute for developers - again, for no good reason. That's Apple for you.
Trying to use an iPad to develop software (or do anything productive really) is always going to be a bad experience even if you can install runtimes. It's just not fit for that use case, and you're always going to be better off with an actual computer.
No. Developing on a bigger monitor is always going to be a better experience, but you can certainly develop on a 13inch screen as well (when traveling or out and about).
Yeah I think they’ve drawn a bright line and people keep insisting this device should be more capable, but Apple _does not want it to be more capable_. They just don’t. They don’t see it as a productivity device (though they often advertise it as one for some reason). It’s like… productivity-lite. A device for unserious people to do unserious things.
The iPad Pro is pulling double duty as both a professional workstation and a CEO laptop.
Tim Cook has bragged about being able to do most of his work on an iPad, and I believe him, because executives spend most of their time reading and replying to e-mail. The iPad does that well because it inherited the Mail app from iPhones, which was already pretty good and just needed to be blown up to a larger size. And iPads make your organization look futuristic, at least to all the other executives you're talking to.
The only reason why people are complaining about iPadOS' limitations is because Apple made the mistake of making it useful for creative professionals. They wanted to ship the Apple Pencil and wound up making it an iPad accessory rather than its own thing. So now people who want to draw with the Pencil - which is an amazing drawing experience - are saddled with the limitations of an iPad.
Well, there are definitely serious third party apps for serious users to create music, draw etc. It's just the OS and Apple's apps that are holding it back...
I think desktop alternatives like Wacom tablets or studio DAC equipment are far more useful for professionals and I doubt there’s anything specific to the iPad that would make it a better alternative than a desktop.
Perfectly good reason. They don’t want to cannibalize existing products. You never want the customer thinking there is no real difference between a MacBook and iPad. You want them to truly believe in the uniqueness of the product.
Iwatch was a master class in that bullshit. Took long enough but people did eventually realize it’s a shittier smaller phone lol (but we’re talking genuine levels of shittier).
I love my Apple Watch. I can leave my house, make payments be fully contactable, access useful information about weather, stonks, work pager messages etc. while weaving a heavy clunky device at home and no distractions like social media. It’s also a fitness tracker and saved people I know who have heart conditions lives. I have the ultra abs the battery life is wonderful too.
Like, a device that can literally save your life is shit ?
And yet the watch still requires you to pair it with a phone. They could sell standalone watches without a phone and will cellular service. They won’t though and Apple’s statements about environmentalism are b.s. for this an other reasons.
Not sure if you own an Apple Watch but there is almost zero doubt in my mind they’d sell less watches, especially to boomer generations and above without the phone setup experience. Originally the phone needed the watch for cellular so the UX has grown out of that.
You’re a hacker news reader so more like an “elite” user of technology. Most people aren’t and won’t do things like read the Apple Watch EULAs on the watch, setup payment cards on the watch alone. I don’t think it’s even possible to setup the eSIM and number syncing without the phone yet. It seems tied to your phones IMEI.
Maybe Apple would make a UX for the small minority of people like yourself, but they already have a lot of stuff going on and I guess it’s not financially viable to satisfy everyone in all situations.
I don’t believe there is any legitimate reason to not allow the watch to be a standalone device with cellular ability and a phone number or have cellular capability and to be able to use something like a Google Voice number.
They couldn’t sell less watches if they allowed what I suggest becuase they could always allow the option of tying it to a phone. Instead of having stupid things like an app keep track of how often you are on your phone how about give people an option of not having a phone? Let people have the connectivity they want in case of emergencies and to communicate without needing a phone.
Who's to say in the future they won't sell the watch independently? Personally, I just don't really like the conspiracy thinking. I have an iPhone and an Apply watch and currently. I understand why the app is important for managing the watch easily and I can also imagine a time in the future when the voice assitance or the UX has improved to the point where the app can go.
I don’t think in conspiracies normally but in this case I think it’s apt. I think an independent Apple Watch would cannibalize iPhone sales. Just like a fully capable iPad Pro would cannibalize Mac sales.
Would be nice to have, but I don't even use this functionality on my MacBook or iMac(s) at home. For me computers (and iPads) have always just been "personal" for as long as I've used them.
It's pretty common though for people to let kids use the iPad and not their personal-work-everything-MacBook. iPads don't even have a guest mode, so you are essentially limited to deciding whether the whole device is personal or for sharing.
Honestly for this use case it’s easier to just buy a cheap second hand iPad for your kids. At least that way when they smash it, it’s only $200 to replace instead of whatever the latest pro costs now.
In my case, the only iPad is the cheap secondhand one. It would still be nice if I could "borrow" it for the weekend without having to sign in to every service that is already tied to my Apple ID.
I don't disagree with you in general and it is what I recommend to others with the same issue... but the issue is completely unnecessary since (however many generations ago iPad hardware stopped struggling).
This is exactly what I did. I got 2 refurbished iPads for about $100 bucks a piece almost 3 years ago. Works great, and the kids don’t fight over who’s turn it is.
> But Apple has a problem if their position is the same as yours.
From what i see, this is their position and it looks like, so far, it has worked out for them quite well. I'd love to hear your take on it as it seems you have a different than mine.
Well investors tend to care more about future growth potential than past performance. History tells us that the outlook for expensive proprietary platforms is usually not so good.
I agree and the fall has already started I believe. But they have "believers" that don't seem to understand the rational of people saying this.
Funny thing is that even Steve Jobs said as much in an interview: basically, that a computing platform was dead without market share and they made a mistake with the Mac, making it too inaccessible for too many people.
But I guess history and mistakes are just a cycle.
It would be very good for everyone if they fell from grace and start "losing" profit so they can't start working on stuff, once again.
Apple's resistance to a mouse continued with the resistance to having a mouse pointer.
A Surface Pro running MacOS would be the real game changer.
Being touch-first is much more inefficient than using a mouse and keyboard.
The pageantry of taps and swipes needed add up to a lot of time, and knowing the difference, it can be difficult to justify the effort. Maybe I'm missing a detail.
Apple is excellent at introducing technology to beginners (just use your finger), it doesn't mean it's the most productive or effective.
was just thinking the other day due to the latest iPad release.. I dont know how people stand to use an iPad when you can get a 13" Macbook air or in your case the 12" and just use that. Just the fact that the screen is held to the correct angle for 90% of use cases is huge. Sitting.. lounging.. I can't even really think of a regular use case I have where the iPad ergonomics are better.
He is non-technical and it took some bullying to get him to max out the ram and cpu but he never imagined an 11" wouldn't be availbale in the future and assumed he'd upgrade.
The 11" was excellent. If there was a newer version, the bezels would be much smaller, and maybe a different kind of 12" could fit in it.
There is not much that is interesting after so many new devices, but an 11" or 12" would be something I'd want quickly enough to line up for it.
It basically just switches over Apple app accounts, such as Music and Photos. Everything else---all third party apps and the home screen layout and BT devices---are exactly the same.
It's laughably bad, since Photos doesn't even support more than one iCloud photo library per TV, so switching just makes the Photos app not work.
Mainly it makes the Apple TV+ app understand your watching history (“up next”) better.
Apple has an API so that third party apps can tie profiles to appletv user ids (iCloud ids) but I haven’t seen a single 3P app that uses it. Apple could make it mandatory at some point I suppose but the UX for connecting the two in each app would likely be tedious.
Also there is no password protection with changing user ids so kids can accidentally screw up your watch history / preferences. And without any passwords you don’t want to connect photos or anything like that to the tv.
It’s pretty much a botch, just like the cases described in this article.
iPad sharing is a massive no go. That product is mostly for the education industry and you better convince the school board every kid needs their own iPad (an AI powered one soon enough). Basically becomes a government mandated device, good business.
Android supports this but as usual with Android, it's shoddy and broken.
For example, if you log out of a secondary profile and log back in, all your widgets will be gone. I don't have the bug link handy but IIRC, it's been open since 2021.
While I agree multi-user would be nice, I don't necessarily agree it's a good thing for families. A shared device should be treated as such. Don't install or login to apps that you're not okay with the rest of the family accessing.
I'd even argue that children that aren't old enough to have their own device (IMO before high school) don't need a personal profile. And on that tangent, kids shouldn't even use phones/tablets device unless they can responsibly use them.
Preface: I fully agree with you and wont buy an iPad weithout user switching.
However, user switching seems to be a features more on lower priced budget devices for world markets where individual people cant afford their own devices. When you are rich enough to live in the western world and buy Apple products, you dont share them!
My guess is that in addition to Apple just not caring, they have market research telling them that most users don't want this feature. I imagine that the average HN commenter is probably as far as possible from the average iPad buyer. The main usecase is for families, and it's introducing a lot of complexity for basically no return.
Yeah, and people having families is pretty rare: no more than a few percent of their market :eyeroll:. The issue isn't that people don't want it: almost everyone wants it! The issue is that the alternatives to the iPad for its use cases are almost precisely zilch, and so implementing this feature mostly serves to cause people to spend less money on redundant iPads.
AppleTV has multi-user support but it’s not NEARLY good enough. I would really appreciate more capability there. I want cleaner boundaries around the standard and child experiences, as well as more individualization.
Mostly I’m annoyed that all the individual streaming apps have profiles, but they don’t have any link to the Apple ID you’re using. If I’m the active user on the AppleTV, I should see the apps I care about and my profile in those apps.
TL;DR stop letting my family ruin my recommendations.
Good luck. People would then just buy one iPad and share it in the household. Apple is struggling to be profitable, I see no reason they should not try to make every penny they can.
Nah. I suspect that if Apple enabled multiple accounts, it would be a feature used by a very small minority of iPad users. It wouldn't make a dent in their sales.
It’s a “hallucination”. Human Intelligences are currently quite prone to them. Many times they just make up plausible sounding sentences that aren’t true because they’re just fancy autocomplete.
What's absurd to me is: forget all of what this article writes about, because Apple could fix all of it and the iPad would still be fundamentally flawed at a more basic level than anything listed, because editing text is horrifically broken, has been since the first iPhone came out, and hasn't seen any significant improvement since I can't remember.
And the crazy part is: just like this article, everyone overlooks it.
Pay attention, and you'll notice it. (sorry to everyone who had blanked it out). Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words. It's agonizing once you think about it, and Apple (nor Google, as far as I know) has done zero to fix it in years (a decade?).
Typing and editing text has worked perfectly (with and without a proper keyboard) for many years on iDevices, until Apple broke it in the most recent OS version. Some major change, apparently related to spellchecker, hinders cursor movement now and results in entire words being unintentionally selected all the time.
(PSA: if the recent change annoys you to no end, as it did me, you can get back the previous editing behavior by turning off spellchecker in OS settings.)
Not counting source code, I type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it.
> Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words.
None of those are slow. You know you can:
1) tap anywhere in text to move the cursor?
2) long tap (and drag if desired) to do the same ignoring word boundaries?
3) hold spacebar to move the cursor around the text?
Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all?
Yes, if you like pain and insist on typing on a screen keyboard (I guess I do), certain text adjustments would be marginally slower than with a hardware keyboard, but on the other hand if you normally type English then swipe-typing more than compensates for that.
This behaviour is a mess, IME. iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong. I regularly find words or lines it will refuse to position the cursor into, instead insisting on moving to the line above or below. Line breaks seem to confuse it too. I often have to position the cursor the word before the line break, insert my new text and then reposition to delete the old text.
2) + 3) The rhythm to engage this vs the one to engage selection is completely opaque to me. I still don't know how to engage selection intentionally, successfully. I've owned iPhones since the 3s.
It’s not arbitrary, it’s intentional (though you and I may hate it)
The default UITextInputStringTokenizer prefers to place the caret at word boundaries. I implemented exact placement for my coding app, Codea, and wrote about the text system extensively here: https://sim.coffee/textual-healing/
Exact caret placement is actually surprisingly effective with a reasonable font size. I wish Apple offered it as a preference system-wide
Selection defaults to a double-tap to select at the word granularity. Triple tap will select at the paragraph granularity. This is customisable in your own apps, though the system defaults to the one specific to your current language
> iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong.
For me it's closer to 100% of the time because it is incapable of letting you tap one word over, you have to tap far away then where you want, because it simply will NOT listen when you tap to a neighboring word, it will move the cursor right back to the word it's on.
I’m on iOS 17 and when I tap any word in the text field, neighboring or not, the cursor 100% of the time jumps at the boundary of that word closest to the tap. It is precise enough that I can aim before or after trailing punctuation. Whether there is a word selected or not does not matter: if I previously selected a word by double-tapping, the cursor jump will just un-select it.
I have made a screen recording, but am too lazy to figure out a way to share it.
It almost sounds like a few repliers here are using some other phone, or ignored the point I made previously about the spell checker. I feel your pain but I can help no more.
> or ignored the point I made previously about the spell checker
It turns out I had ignored the point about the spell checker. I had turned off auto-correction, but left on checking/underlining. So I apologise for that.
So I turned off the checker and it's noticeably better, but still not ideal. The first attempt I made got the word wrong by one. I continued with more success but found other strange issues.
For example: If I gently long-press, I get a tiny popup showing the words either side of the cursor magnified slightly. This seems a modern implementation of the old "magnifying glass" feature. This "magnifier" follows the cursor works if you then drag left/right and sometimes up. If you drag down, it disappears. It's smaller than the original magnifying glass, and closer to the cursor (and your finger) so it's less useful... and why close it when dragging down??
> I can help no more
I think you misunderstand the intent of my post. I wasn't asking for help. I was venting, and attempting to show that Apple have handled this interaction badly. Like... really f*king badly. It's a mess. How is turning off spell checking an acceptable "solution"? The fiddliness and erratic experience should not have passed QA. Or... perhaps the company should review the intentions it has for these platforms. I put up with it on my phone because it's small enough that it cannot be anything other than shit for most tasks (especially for people like me with poor vision). But they're trying to claim iPadOS is a serious bit of kit for serious work, and it fails at stuff that was largely solved for 30 years prior on "proper" computers.
I know people here mostly vent, but I was compelled to help because I type in the phone a lot and felt a similar pain after a recent update and it is fine now that I changed the settings.
This. This. This. THIS. SO MUCH THIS. The "tap away to deselect the original wrong select so you tap back to fix it" has taken at least a day off my life -- half a day for actual wasted time, and another half a day for frustration causing a slightly premature death...
As an Apple developer and iPhone user since the 3S, these issues are baked into the OS. That you haven't experienced them speaks to your particular usage. Editing and selecting text has been a longstanding problem with improvements and regressions. As another commenter said, it's a huge annoyance.
Try selecting multiple paragraphs on a website, for example. The behavior is generally unpredictable and requires lots of fiddling. Deselecting text requires yet more work. Double-tapping a word should select the word itself, but that's often not the case. And it's not just websites where the DOM adds complexity; the same erroneous behavior exists for native apps.
For example, open an iMessage text and paste one or more images. Now go back and try to edit existing text. Or add new text. Moving the cursor and text selection is non-deterministic and requires scrolling and fiddling, manually adding line breaks, and then removing them just to get the formatting correct.
In other words, as the OP mentioned, text editing has been problematic on iOS/iPadOS for ages. Interestingly, VisionOS, which perhaps has the most challenging input and editing environment, has managed to resolve many of these issues.
While initial VisionOS releases were buggy and nearly unusable, it's rather striking that you can now use your eyes to move and edit text with more precision than what's possible on iOS/iPadOS--which tells you how much room there is for improvement.
> For example, open an iMessage text and paste one or more images.
I never until today thought of pasting images. I always add them using the Photos button, then just write my message as normal.
I see now how moving cursor around rich text with embedded objects is glitchy, and I imagine if you deal with that on daily basis it could be frustrating.
However, none of the other issues you or others described seem to be reproducible on my phone. Double-tap to select, or tap to place cursor, seem to just work in regular plain text areas.
iOS 16 and I've not used a spell checker for years because it kept correcting my swearing & slang to something I didn't want to say. I did read your comment fully. I replied because I had personal experience that contradicted yours. The "it doesn't place the cursor beside the word I want" gets me a couple of times a week for a couple of years.
I thought you like other repliers are having cursor “misbehaving” all the time, since you wrote it misplaces cursor 50% of the time earlier. That is definitely not my experience.
A couple of times per week it happens for me that the cursor chooses to land on the wrong side of white space or such, but that is infrequent enough and easy to fix that it does not bother me.
> type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it.
Yes you would just like a lot of other people do - because the device is truly portable, so you can suffer more inconvenience to use it everywhere to communicate in immediate mode
> Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all?
No it won't, I've changed those bad defaults with macos-only apps
> You know you can
Yes I do, and still agree with the OP that the software support is bad and none of the things you list are properly engineered despite the fact that direct analogue finger input has great potential
And if you meant awful inconvenience you should've said so in the previous comment. It simply is ... inconvenient, much more so than with a regular keyboard, but not as awful as to make it completely impractical, so the other benefits can outweigh it and result in plenty of phone typing
See the comment I originally replied to. “Horrifically broken”, “many steps” and so on.
Also, for me it is often about as fast to type as with a hardware keyboard thanks to swipe typing. Perhaps I think slow enough that it’s not a bottleneck. Pity you all fast thinkers, I suppose.
Editing is sometimes a bit slower, but also depends.
Thank you so much for the PSA. I have been in and out of the keyboard settings screen many times since the update but could not find what was causing the single-tap word selection. Jeeez, talk about an unbelievably annoying feature. Especially bad is how tapping anywhere after the last word in a text area gets interpreted as tapping ON that word, making it impossible to return to the end of an open paragraph with single-tap cursor movement.
Another annoyance for me is when trying to move the cursor to the end of a long text box like the URL bar in Safari. You basically have to keep using the “hold space bar” method and swiping one inch at a time. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this but I haven’t found it yet.
I find that dragging the cursor to the right is fast enough. However, removing that initial selection of the entire URL takes a couple of frustrating extra taps.
Removing complete selection in a single-line input is a weak point of editing experience on iOS (it is easy in a textarea since you have space to just tap away).
I'm on my first iphone (13) after decades with android/bb/nokia and I cannot explain how much I loathe typing on this thing. It's like it actively goes out of my way to make me not want to copy/paste/edit urls, etc. I also have a terrible time hitting the correct letters and I have scrawny salad fingers.
Every iPhone super user I'm surrounded by (everyone) never talks about how awful the typing experience is and makes me feel like a luddite for not doing it well. I wasn't sure if they were just used to it or they just know how to use it correctly and I don't.
It's horrible. It's helped me a lot to stop pulling my phone out to use social media/web etc to pass time because if I can't click it, if i have to type in a URL or anything like that, I just don't want to even try.
They don't, it's part of the "believer" persona where they will excuse anything and everything, thinking that since it is so expensive and gives so much status that it can't be bad or wrong.
The state of things is appalling, some cheap Android phones give better experience with typing/keyboard than the most expensive Apple phones (you get a proper number row in the first place, avoiding extremely annoying switching when working with numbers).
And I say that as someone who bought the first iPhone (literally imported it before it was even available in France), when the hardware was so superior to anything else on the market that it didn't matter as much that the software could be lacking in some ways.
Nowadays the hardware is still good (overpriced, at least in France) but the software is bad/annoying/lacking on so many levels it's just insane that Apple keeps getting away with selling so many expensive devices with deeply flawed software.
But there has been a slowdown in sales and their chip leadership doesn't matter as much as it used to (at least in phones), so maybe they will start improving their stuff. One can only hope.
Slowdown in sales is inescapable if you make something that doesn’t become obsolete right away. At some point your target audience already has your phones and no strong reason to buy a new one.
> some cheap Android phones give better experience with typing/keyboard
There will always be a phone that beats iPhone in one way or another. There are Android phones with 6000 Hz PWM for low frequency flicker-sensitive people, Android phones with e-ink screens, Android phones with hardware keyboards, etc. However, they suck in other ways because of Android (horrifically insecure, often full of malware from Chinese vendors that requires being a hacker to weed out, lagging in accessibility, etc.) and bad hardware that quickly obsoletes, while iPhones are quite well-rounded and work for everyone on a more or less intuitive level despite what all the haters say about it being “abysmal” in one way or another.
I agree on the slowdown thing, it is normal in a way.
But only if you consider that Apple should only do hardware to make 45% profit on it.
And this is where I disagree, a lot more Android phones are sold every year because in the end people break/lose their phones, they become insufficient for their needs or they just don't have the means to buying a luxury phone that should be a useful tool first and foremost.
While people are largely irrational when it comes to Apple stuff (the "reasons" people buy iPhone are largely emotional for the vast majority or buyers) they are not entirely stupid and Android phones have become much cheaper for very comparable hardware, when they will have to renew, they may switch. It's definitely a problem for Apple even if you don't think so.
In my country a base iPhone 15 is 970 euros while you can get a Pixel 8 for 600 euros. The phones are very comparable in hardware quality, there is no way an iPhone is 60% better. And there is no way it's going to provide 60% better value over its lifetime, that irrational "thinking" (emotional behavior) that comes with the purchase of luxury products. And I think it shouldn't be a luxury product, it serves no one but Apple to have a tool become a luxury status symbol. It's worse than other luxury products because they don't get a market share as large and they don't influence the purchase of other goods/services as much.
Android is as insecure as you allow it to be. No one I know with an Android phone ever complain to me about Chinese malware. And I'm the tech guy and I get asked about bugs, installation of 3rd party stores, ad blockers, rooting, DNS bypass but no malware. And many have Chinese phones (Huawei and Xiaomi mostly).
You just have irrational fears instilled by bullshit marketing and emotional "arguments" from believers. It's a bit like the alarm salespeople who find a way to sell their "solution" that costs more overtime than what it is supposed to protect. Good sales pitch, I guess.
As for the hardware, Android phones do not become obsolete quicker than iPhones (quite the contrary in fact). Since Google and Samsung announced 7 years of support, that cannot be a valid argument anymore.
Also, I know from experience that Apple is, in fact, the one to blame. Under the guise of "free updates" they make their hardware become too slow or insufficient in a way that makes it borderline useless while not even providing all the functionalities announced in the update for older hardware.
How nice of them to save themselves the trouble of actually supporting an OS instead of conveniently just pushing a single OS on everyone to ease their maintenance burden even though very few will actually want/benefit from the new stuff.
For example, when I sold my Apple Watch Series 3 it became impossible to update it without erasing the whole thing. It received no worthwhile functionality in exchange, most of the new stuff was locked to the new watches (precisely the reason I changed in the first place) and the new software made it slower and have less battery life. To add insult to the injury, it is impossible to go back on an update so you are basically stuck with hardware that is not completely useless but has lost much of its value as a tool. All that to keep the thing compatible with their phone OS.
The only reason I didn't feel bad about selling it is because I sold it cheap to a friend and I take care of the issues for him and he just uses it as a simple watch. He wanted to look cool without spending too much money and he has no use of any of the functionalities, which is the majority of Apple Watch users in my experience.
I use it as a sport watch (swimming/running) but my next one will be a real sports watch. Outside of that use case it's pointless and Apple behavior around softwares/update is too bad to invest more money in a product that is lackluster and deeply flawed despite all the years/profits they had.
I think you are largely convinced by emotions about Apple stuff. They have some benefits and are well made but as far as my experience tells me, the major benefit is mostly how people will look at you.
It's a bit like arguing that a BMW is a better car than a Toyota. Yeah sure, but in practice both will let you lose your permit (depending on model, one much faster than the other) and both will carry you to the same places if they are functionally comparable models. But some people still get the BMW, not because there is a particularly good reason for it but because they like how people will look at them and treat them because of it. Unsurprisingly most of this group tends to be young males.
The iPhone is basically the same, expect it is a different target demographic, that is larger (younger person, predominantly females).
Perhaps the reason they do not talk about it is because they find it convenient, like me. Could be adjustment period, or you need to play with your keyboard settings (spellchecker and so on).
I find typing extremely easy and fast for the most part, except when swipe-typing gets the wrong word.
1. Open Messages
2. Open any conversation
3. Type "This is going to hurt"
4. Now, in one "tap anywhere," place the cursor after the word "is"
Spoiler -- the cursor will be before the word "going," after the space. It's possible to select after "is" -- for example, you can select after "going" if you're careful (I'd say you have to tap around the "n")
Of course I know about the long tap -- as I said, I've been doing roughly that since at least the deep press days. Open Safari, go to a typically long Amazon URL, and try to get to the end of the URL to edit something. Depending on the URL length, it requires:
1. Tap quickly so the whole URL isn't selected (otherwise you'll drag it)
Then multiple cycles of:
1. Long tap
2. Drag to the right
3. Reach the end of the screen, but not the URL
4. Back to (1)
The spacebar is the same as the long tap. It's better than nothing, but not sufficient.
And adding a keyboard doesn't fix the fundamental issue that Apple hasn't thought deeply about this.
Swipe-typing is a blessing and a curse. Think about what you have to do if:
1. You want to add an "s" to pluralize something
2. You just need to change the last letter or two
3. You want to add any other character right after the word besides the limited set Apple has deemed worthy of special treatment
And that is:
1. Type space
2. Type backspace
3. Type the actual thing you want to type
That's three actions to do one thing. And that doesn't even begin to cover how swipe typing handles alternatives: backspace and do it over? Really? How about automatically popping up alternatives for selection (and then dismissing if the user keeps swiping)?
I'm happy for you that you're happy. I'm not. Apple: hire me and I'll make this better. :-)
What if I need to type "too"? More to the point, with longer words it's entirely possible to put the insertion point after that word. The shorter the word is, the harder it is to do, until at some point it is impossible (? maybe I need smaller fingers?). That alternative use case just fades into impossibility (again, maybe) without explanation or guidance.
To be clear: I'm not saying that every choice Apple has made is the opposite of what makes sense. I'm saying that in many cases they could have increased usability, and that overall usability is bad enough that editing is painful, substantially slower than on other platforms (MacOS) and that I think there are at least some use cases they could address, but they haven't.
Yes, with short words like “or” it is difficult to tap cursor to place it exactly before or after trailing punctuation; however, holding and dragging cursor to a precise position needed (thanks to magnifying glass) takes about a second to do.
It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste - why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard?
Similarly, I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters. Moving the cursor is similarly infuriating. On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here?
Wouldn't be as big of a problem if the spellchecker was not absolute garbage and handled multi-language text input, or just worked well for a single language. Honestly, I don't think the team working on the keyboard at apple has any linguists or any kind of diversity to pay attention to nothing but the most milktoast of English language use.
This is not in any way a criticism of you: it is positively absurd how many people are unaware of this. As bad as text editing is for those who know most of the tricks, the fact that many of the tricks are unknown to a substantial number of people is off-the-charts bad on Apple.
I’d say the main problem is that it doesn’t work while operating a phone single-handed, when you only have a thumb available, but on iPad I can see it being useful after some getting used to.
I tried on an iPad. That works but it’s really not a good experience, unless I’m doing it incorrectly. On an iPhone it’s also pretty awkward, I don’t think I will ever use that feature but it’s good to know it exists
On an IPhone and I struggle with the trackpad mode as well. I frequently might want to select a block of text, but the OS really only wants me to select to here and no more. Cannot pin down what arbitrary threshold I am missing.
That's a neat trick. It seems to only work to extend the selection to the right? Meaning:
1. Long-tap with your right thumb, drag the cursor to the end of a sentence
2. Tap with your left thumb (to the left of your right thumb) and drag to the left to select the sentence -- nothing happens
3. Drag your right thumb to the right to make sure you understand what's happening and you're doing it right -- the selection extends, yay!
4. Again try dragging your left thumb -- nothing happens.
How could Apple's human interaction people let this ship?!
> why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard?
You can tap and hold with three fingers to bring up the clipboard bar which has icons for undo, redo, cut, copy, and paste. Assuming that's what you mean by "access the clipboard"?
Personally, I almost never use it since I often operate single-handed and it is not part of my muscle memory. Tapping the cursor then waiting a second or so for regular context menu (with lookup, translate and other options) is my preferred way.
> It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste
I copy and pasted this on an iPhone - I tapped the comment box which summoned the keyboard, and I tapped again and it gave me Paste/Autofill as options.
> On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here?
This is out of the box functionality on iOS. I had a samsung device before, and I had no end of issues with the keyboard failing to summon, certain apps refusing to use my preferred keyboard, password managers not working properly, inconsistent selection/focus/edit dialog behaviour. I don't get _any_ of those issues with iOS.
> It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste
> I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters.
Your description reminds me of how it felt after that recent OS update I mentioned, until I realized I can turn off spellchecker to restore the previous typing behaviour. Now the copy/paste popover and drag-selection work every time, but I have to really watch for typos.
Like me, you were used to previous behaviour, and the new one is unfamiliar to the point of broken. I agree that Apple has royally screwed up here by making this the default behavior in iOS 17.
However, it’s a bit disingenuous to say it was always broken if it only started working differently in the latest version.
> why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard
On iPad, if you bring up a large keyboard by pinch-zooming the small one, you get those buttons on screen keyboard. (On an external keyboard, the normal macOS copy-paste key combos work always.)
As a very very regular iPad user, and this may be against Apple's intentions, if you're using the on screen keyboard for that stuff you're doing it wrong and are a masochist. I use the Mac for any text editing job because you really need a proper computer for that and the iPad is not a proper computer.
For me, the iPad is mostly a surface for writing on, general admin tasks and basic image editing. The Apple Pencil is the best input device I find. It's not a complete replacement device - it's complementary. Also my 11" iPad Pro is smaller than any laptop and charges off the same charger as my phone so it goes everywhere with me. I'm about to jump on a plane and it has a week's worth of entertainment, music, textbooks, notepad and Lightroom on it and a pencil stuck on the side. This is just perfect for me. But try and replace a macOS machine with it and you might as well chop your fingers off.
The keyboard case is mostly ok but I just never use it. I should probably bounce it on eBay at some point but I keep it around "just in case".
Edit: most of the people I know who use iPads got them mostly for the Apple Pencil support.
> I use the Mac for any text editing job because you really need a proper computer for that and the iPad is not a proper computer.
> For me, the iPad is mostly a surface for writing on, general admin tasks and basic image editing.
I think that's pretty much what the business model grew into and is now cultivated and enforced. There is no Macbook convenient for consumption and no tablet convenient for processing. Either one can do both, but it's cumbersome.
Apple knows they can get their target group to buy both products, so they take care to keep those territories isolated.
And that's also revealing the general handicap the iPad Pro has: It is a product designed to close this gap, running on a OS designed to consciously maintain this gap.
I detest this take so very much. It's as if people have forgotten that laptops were perfectly capable for that most loathesome of words, "consumption", for eons, thank you very much.
I can connect my laptop to enormous monitors and have a lovely movie watching experience. Connect a projector to it, huge speakers, 4k resolution, HDR and whatnot.
What's so much better about content consumption on an iPad that a PC cannot do? The fucking iPad really grinds my gears, it's the most woeful marker of our environmental excesses. Where even a supercomputer smartphone and a hypercomputer computer isn't enough for people. Lamentable.
I'll play devils advocate though I mostly agree with you, as there are occasions where I find consumption on an iPad to be "superior" in the sense that it fits into a certain situation better at a certain time.
If I'm traveling, an iPad is great to watch movies in my hotel room while my partner is sleeping rather than blast the room with extra light and noise. This same scenario can also play out at home! I want to be near my partner but that doesn't mean I need to take over the entire room. We have technology that enables that dynamic now. And my argument against using a laptop in this scenario is largely focused on ergonomics. It's really easy to prop an iPad on my lap and watch Netflix for 3 hours instead of worrying about my laptop overheating on the duvet or needing to be plugged in.
Reading books is also another great consumption medium that is personal to me, even if yes, technically I can read an epub on any computer (and I have read many comics online at a desktop!).
It's not that the PC is incapable of playing back the same media, it's that the form factor of an iPad is often _better_ for any number of scenarios with the tradeoffs of weight/bulk being a more deciding factor in the moment. Sometimes I just want to watch The Office in a comfy chair at a cafe with a latte and an iPad is an extremely convenient medium to fulfill that goal.
With that example of watching movies in a hotel room while your partner is sleeping or a show at a cafe, what makes the iPad much better than a laptop in those instances? If anything, I tend to prefer the laptop as it inherently has a built-in stand with a nice solid platform.
About the only place I find a tablet a better form factor for watching movies is on a cramped airplane seat.
Heat and weight mostly. While the laptop is more "stable" that only applies if you have it standing on it's own. If you want it more in your lap, then that isn't really applicable.
Laptops have a screen and a keyboard. Only the screen is needed for consumption and the keyboard gets in the way in several environments, for example a bed. It's both the extra space and the screen orientations that it forces. When all we had were laptops they were great, then we had tablets and laptops didn't look so great anymore for some purposes.
Keyboard can be helpful in consumption scenario, simply because you can set up correct angle for a display. IPad cases I uses typically have just a single position.
That said, iPad is more convenient when in a bed because you can more easily put it away when you get sleepy, you can read sideways, it's more resilient if in a good case, etc. I never carry laptop to bed, while iPad is part of my go-to-sleep routine since v1.
For me what makes tablet different is the distance you use them. And I think that's also why many people feel that touch doesn't work on laptops when they're comfortable with it on tablets.
If you're reading a book, holding it in your hands works a lot better than looking at it at twice the distance. Same way checking a map at arms length and pinch/zoom right there.
Long movies benefit less from the form factor, but youtube for instance works better.
For what it's worth, 2in1 computers are IMHO pretty good these days. The hinges improved a lot they give the best of both world.
It's simply the further debasement of the language: "content" and "consume", "fleece" meaning a piece of plastic (and "lamb" being used for both lamb and mutton), "elite" meaning "better", "gift" as a verb, excessive and gratuitous use of intensifiers (the physical manifestation is standing ovations after any public performance) the content-free of useful words like "freedom" and "patriot" and so on.
Languages constantly change and that's delightful. But there is a class of changes that are deliberate manipulation for commercial or propaganda purposes. Often the idea is to hollow out the word and insert a new meaning into the husk, so listenera (at least initially) get the associations of the old meaning while it is transformed into a new one.
I hate this because it is deceptive, and I also hate it when no handy way remains to specify the original meaning ("plastic fleece" would be silly and redundant these days; you can't usefully say "real fleece" any more, so what term do you use?)
"Consuming" a book would mean destroying it ("consumed by fire"). Economists use this for the action of people who buy rivalrous goods or services -- a logical and obvious metaphor. But the use of "content" and "consumption" were deliberate coining: "content" expells any differentiation of what it refers to, applying an equivalence to user-generated work, commercial speech, advertising, propaganda, whatever; "consume" reinforces a corporate producer -> passive consumer mentality that again strips away the agency of the person actually looking at the screen.
Just part of the incessant effort to turn the Internet into "a remote control with a buy button".
>What's so much better about content consumption on an iPad that a PC cannot do?
You can use it on the craper, and can hold it with one hand on the bed or sofa, even lying on your back. Battery lasts a very good while (like 3x the time laptop bateries lasted when the iPad came out, modern AS laptops have caught up).
It also doesn't have all the other macOS maintainance, options, and junk I don't need for the content consumption I do with the iPad (browsing, youtube, netflix, books and magazines, social media for those whose that's their thing).
I mean that kind of extra portability/convenience is the whole purpose of tablets. It's not like they're some totally different technology and can do things a laptop can't do. It's a marginal convenience thing for those aspects.
I don’t find consuming on a Mac hard at all. It even has advantages - better speakers, larger screen, a whack of games that just don’t exist on iPadOS, the ability to install arbitrary media software, and more extensive means of media organization in general.
The on screen keyboard is really best in class if you have to enter text on a screen. For entering and editing larger text, I use a Bluetooth mechanical keyboard paired with my iPad. Dictation also works pretty decently (actually my preferred way of writing long text drafts). Really don’t see the problem with entering text (written on my iPad Air m1 with on screen keyboard)…
Had 2 pencils, broke both within 1 week when they rolled of the table…
I write a lot (several thousand words per day) and even though I love the convenience of writing and editing on my iphone and ipad, it’s become clear in the last couple of years that if I want to write efficiently, I have to do it on my desktop. Text editing (for writing, not coding) has gotten significantly worse in iOS over the last 2-3 years, especially with long documents. I’m surprised that others haven’t noticed this.
Since there are a lot of Android and Windows devices out there, and the top applications are multiplatform (Whatsapp, FB, snapchat, much less wikipedia, google search and such) I'm not sure how much lock in there really is.
Nerds like us who care about running code on our machines are really the minority. Just look how little volume and revenue Apple gets from the mac (if they were run like most businesses they would have sold off or shut down the mac business long ago)
All the big tech companies are guilty of illegally suppressing competition in various ways, including locking customers into their platforms through various means.
But Apple? Nobody goes as hard as Apple does with their lock-in strategies. I personally like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I'm not going to assume you're just being ignorant because you love Apple. Instead, I'm curious to know what makes you doubt that lock-in isn't their entire business model?
For example, in what universe would iCloud (as it exists today) succeed if customers could actually choose an alternate cloud storage provider for their iPhone/iPad with the same level of system integration?
I don't know -- I do use the icloud/appleID to share cut/paste between my devices or have my watch unlock my mac, but all my files are stored on dropbox, my omnifocus is in OF's storage, passwords in 1password's storage etc. I use MS word, not Apple's crappy pages, etc.
I have used android and windows. It's just that the Apple stuff tends to suck less (but not always, per the examples above).
Apple denies it, but the look is in fact that they would rather iOS running on the Mac.
I'm not sure where this aesthetic comes from — that somehow traditional desktop/laptops are an outmoded way of computing and that touchy, file-manager-less, terminal-less, tool-less computer use is the way we all ought to be doing things.
It comes from the top, it's CEO and executive.
When you don't use a computing platform to do useful stuff, as a "bicycle for the mind" as Steve Jobs said, it becomes much less clear how iOS/iPad OS can be lackluster in so many ways.
Hilariously, even their office suite has limitations on iPad even though Tim Cook supposedly uses it. I'm sure he does but he probably has most of the real work pre-made for him, by people most likely using a Mac.
People will often talk about the disconnection between the elite and the regular people which can also be found in the relation of manager to worker. And this is exactly a reproduction of that.
When you don't really need to use the tools to make useful stuff there is no way to understand how inadequate they can be. Since they know how much they can profit from iOS with the App Store, they try to push it as much as possible, ignoring the fact that even if everybody wanted/agreed to do that it wouldn't even be technically possible, regardless of profits/prices considerations.
There is no worse leader than one that doesn't periodically put himself in the position of the people he is leading. Tim Cook is unable to do that and he has imposed a feminine way of working: collaboration enforced by a pecking order determined by a social construct that doesn't care much about competence/capabilities and the values of ideas/work on their own merit.
Now Apple will keep making good hardware because they have talents that know what they are doing and they have the means to throw money at basically any problem.
But the finer details won't improve anymore, they refuse to properly compete in the open market and they refuse to compete internally because they now work on a model following feminin ideals that is not conductive to improvements.
This is why the state of current Apple offerings is very frustrating: it's not going to improve in a cost matter because they clearly like their profits too much and it's not going to improve in a quality/functionality way because they just don't have the structure to do so anymore.
Things will change, but probably not for the better and if so, it will probably be pure coincidence. Many of their passionate customer are intuitively making this realization which is why even the most diehard fans are starting to be pissed off (new iPads review sentiment is rather grim, even worse than their AVP that didn't do anything new or useful).
The issue is that an interface that's good for a touchscreen often isn't good when using a keyboard/mouse, and vice versa. Touchscreens require significantly larger targets than mice, which reduces the amount of information that a program can convey. For an example, see how much Windows has regressed in keyboard/mouse usability since Microsoft started targeting 2-in-1 convertible laptops in Windows 8.
I’d argue the iOS text interface isn’t even good for a touch screen.
The keyboard works decent but deleting, selecting, spellchecking, editing, undo is an exercise in frustration.
Like I can’t believe we’re over a decade into this and the delete key still does the thing were it goes from painfully deleting letter by letter for far too long, the. Jumping to words for a moment the. Suddenly deleting huge blocks and sometimes this can’t be undone
That's a fair question to ask. The cheeky answer is that it's not my problem to solve, it's theirs. But I am a product manager, so I'll take a shot. None of these replace what we have. Some of them conflict.
1. Bring back deep presses, which isn't very discoverable, but it's memorable once you get used to it, and make it immediately position the cursor.
2. Allow touching with two fingers. If they're next to each other, immediately position the cursor. Spread them and the selection widens.
3. Allow double-tap to select a word.
4. Double-tap and drag to select word by word.
5. Pinch on a selection to cut.
6. Deep press on a selection and drag-swipe in different directions to copy, cut, and formatting options.
7. Deep press on an unselected spot and drag-swipe in different directions to paste and other options.
> Bring back deep presses, which isn't very discoverable, but it's memorable once you get used to it.
Apple does this with many gestures already. Double tap to select a word for example. I think bringing back deep press would be a great move, and agree with everything else you've said here on that.
> 2. Allow touching with two fingers. If they're next to each other, immediately position the cursor.
Long press will put the cursor where your finger is, and will give you a magnified bubble for finer selection (did you really mean to select before or after the hyphen?)
> Spread them and the selection widen ... Pinch on a selection to...
these pinch style gestures would be unusable on a 5" screen I think, and incredibly fiddly even on a 10.1" iPad screen. I work in games, and even though our controllers can handle multiple inputs, we generally tend to avoid chorded inputs because the average person's dexterity is not as good as you would think.
Yeah, the pinch stuff probably wouldn't work well on a phone. I don't know for certain that the problem is even solvable. But it could be made better, and it's clear Apple either doesn't care to try, or thinks that the tools are so frozen in peoples' minds that innovation wouldn't be accepted.
A full on-screen keyboard that can be summoned anywhere helps a lot. On a 13" device there's no excuse to not have Ctrl, Cmd, Alt, Tab and Shift keys, complete with escape and the arrow keys.
It can be reduced in portrait mode, but should be there in landscape at least. That gives intuitive and ultra precise navigation, standard copy/paste, word by word navigation, fast and precise selection etc.
And it's also super helpful for selection even outside of text fields.
I partially agree. I don’t love typing on iOS/iPad OS and am much happier on a Mac. That said, hundreds of millions of people in the younger generation type blindingly quickly on software keyboard.
Perhaps, like the dying art of handwriting in cursive or the decline in knowing how to drive manual transmission, this just how things will be?
If this were truly such a fundamental problem, why hasn’t some enterprising Android vendor found success with smartphones using Blackberry-style hardware keyboards?
Fwiw, I used Blackberries back before the 2007 iPhone launch and never found it addicting the way others did.
I've had (a few) people at work tell me that their kids are perfectly fine with writing a paper on an iPhone. And have actually turned down the offer to get a laptop. Boggles my mind but <shrug>.
My older iPad gave up the ghost recently and my old MacBook Pro is pretty heavy by today's standards to travel by air with. I don't really work on trips any longer so when I get home, I'll likely get one of the new iPad Airs with accessories and just traveling with a Macbook. (My lightweight Chromebook also went so far out of support, it doesn't work any longer--about 12 years old.
Once you actually see them typing you'll realize that they're not actually more efficient, just used to it and they don't have as much experience with physical keyboards. Auto completion helps with some things but if what you're doing is not straightforward, well, good luck to ya.
My partner works for the govenrment and has written hundred plus page white papers for ministerial & public use. She's a hunt and peck typist. The reality is that most people suck at typing, whether they're using a keyboard or a touch screen.
Yes, I know about the virtual trackpad, and it's still a pain in the butt to use. Before touch-and-hold, there was the faster deep press, which was better albeit not great, and the current setup is a regression.
Add a keyboard is an answer. On-screen keyboard will always be more limited, but I can accept that, as long as it’s good enough for situations where i can’t use an external keyboard. In situations where I know I will have to do a lot of text entry, it’s easy enough to add a keyboard, or use dictation. I use the same Bluetooth mechanical keyboard, Nuphy air 75, on both my MacBook Pro and my iPad, so keyboard experience is same for both, and both come with a suboptimal keyboard out of the box, including the MacBook Pro.
"Add a keyboard" isn't an answer to the point raised, which is that the virtual keyboard on iOS is highly-sub-optimal, and Apple isn't working hard enough to improve it.
For an on screen keyboard I find it far from highly-sub-optimal, I think it’s pretty decent.
More importantly, it’s not realistic to think it will ever be as good as a real keyboard for lot of text entry. I expect dictation to do a better job for data entry.
In fact, this comment was created using dictation on an iPad, almost flawless, not much editing needed afterwards, and you can always use a keyboards if you prefer.
I have a niche complaint that makes physical keyboards a non-starter for me: there is no way to add keyboard layouts to iOS/iPadOS. If you’re used to a layout that isn’t in the subset Apple supports you cannot use a physical keyboard.
I have my own keyboard layout that I use since at least 2011, with drivers for macOS, windows, and Linux. I have no way to make it available on my iPad.
I definitely think you should be able to add keyboard layouts at a software level on iPadOS and iOS, but one possible solution to the problem right now is using a programmable keyboard using QMK [1], ZMK [2], or some other open-source firmware. There's even a usb-usb converter [3] that will convert keystrokes from any keyboard into ones that you map using TMK or QMK, so you can use your own.
Why is this minor complaint that's fixed by any one of the many official and unofficial keyboard attachments at the top of HN on an article about fundamental issues which can't be fixed without major iPadOS changes
You're then relying on an accessory to guarantee text selection.
I'm totally with you: the iPad looks like a competent device from every angle. That's why it's so sad it's only the looks and you have to bend over backwards for basic stuff like selecting a text from a web page or an app straight touching the screen.
For comparison, as much as Windows is ugly and inelegant, there's no basic action on a Surface Pro that requires an attached touch pad.
We're in agreement on all these specific niches the iPad is supposed to fill.
On how much it's filling them correctly, outside of people's feelings we only have a few indicators; I'd say this few years' steadily declining sales could be the best summary ?
Listen dude all I'm saying is that editing text is pretty good on an iPad if you have a keyboard for it. That's it. I don't know what broader market trends or product design flaws are being revealed by sales numbers or anything like that, that's not the conversation I'm having.
>because editing text is horrifically broken, has been since the first iPhone came out
I don't know, it always worked fine for me, and I edit text a lot (writing on the iPad, not coding).
>And the crazy part is: just like this article, everyone overlooks it
Given the above, maybe not so crazy? Maybe you're too fussy?
>Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text;
Why not put them when as you write it, in which case it's quote text quote? Is that not what one does 90% of the time?
And if you remembered it later, how slow it is to just move the cursor to start and end of segment? With the spacebar cursor-move mode it's almost as fact as having a mouse.
>to correct a misspelling
Tap on squiggly-underlined word, accept correct spelling from suggestions?
>and Apple (nor Google, as far as I know) has done zero to fix it in years (a decade?)
Do what exactly? What fancy UI you have in mind that solves it?
And if you do that much writing, why don't you just hook a bluetooth keyboard? Then with some shortcuts to jump by whole words/start-end of line/etc, you can fly, as you would on a laptop.
I would like to better understand your mentality. Every Apple article I read has comments like yours, essentially saying "It works on my machine, its a YOU (the struggling users) problem".
Do you genuinely believe your response is helpful? Just like the OC, I too have noticed the atrocious editing and word manipulation in iOS and, just like OC, I have been text editing for my entire life. iOS is objectively bad at it, in many specific ways. The only way to improve it is for us to be honest about how it can be better and go from there. Coping with the issues as if they dont even exist is not a good path forward.
>Every Apple article I read has comments like yours, essentially saying "It works on my machine, its a YOU (the struggling users) problem".
Rather, I'm saying: "it works, period" (on all machines).
The OC said it himself: "everyone overlooks it". Perhaps because it's not really there for them, and you're just more fussy ones?
>Do you genuinely believe your response is helpful?
Do you genuinely believe that any complain is legitimate?
The purpose of my comment wasn't to help with it (since I don't consider it broken): it was to counter the idea that "editing text is horrifically broken".
>iOS is objectively bad at it, in many specific ways.
If it was "objectively bad" I and the other commenter wouldn't be able to refuse it, nor would "everyone overlook it".
You: why no [type correctly in the first place so editing isn't necessary]?
How does that even remotely answer the original objection?
You: With the spacebar cursor-move mode it's almost as fact as having a mouse.
I just did a quick check: with a mouse in this comment I can select insert points about once a second, maybe a bit faster. Before words in iOS I can do better than that: maybe 0.75 of a second? So yay! Then after: works for long words, fails for short words. Then in the words: tap-hold-drag to the spot, maybe once every two seconds. Then there was the time when iOS for no apparent reason selected the word instead of before the word. Then no amount of tapping will fix that until I tap <somewhere else> and then tap back where I want the insertion point. That took 3-4 seconds. Then there was the time when the tap-hold-drag option zoomed several lines above where my finger actually was, and I futzed with it trying to make it right, and eventually managed to not insert the cursor where I wanted. That took over five seconds and then I had to do it again to make it right. The logic of when the little zoom bubble shows up feels arbitrary.
If the misspelling bit worked correctly, that would be great. Sometimes it just wants to select the word.
> Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words. It's agonizing once you think about it,
> Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text
4 taps - beginning of word, quote, end of word quote.
> to correct a misspelling
double tap on word, start typing the correct one. Double tap the word, and use the "replace" dropdown. Or, tap and use spacebar as a cursor to selectively edit a single word. This is certainly no worse than a mouse, but it is sub par to a physical keyboard.
> to rearrange some words
I'm not sure what you mean here, as I can't say that I find myself doing this often, so maybe I'm not your target audience here.
> double tap on word, start typing the correct one.
Why can't I select the correct location and just backspace one or two characters instead? Android handles it perfectly fine, and has for more than a decade.
> I'm not sure what you mean here, as I can't say that I find myself doing this often, so maybe I'm not your target audience here.
Copy-paste menu is very finicky. Sometimes it appears, sometimes it doesn't, the selection marks seem to miss the mark occasionally as well.
I've had all the problems you mention on android over a 4 year period of a Pixel phone into a samsung phone, and none of them in the last 6 months going back to iOS
> Why can't I select the correct location and just backspace one or two characters instead
Press and hold and it will drop the cursor where you want.
This is absolutely correct, the text selecting/editing behavior on iOS 17 is unbearable.
I remember reading a review or watching a video where someone said this is the type of problem that if Steve Jobs was still around would not exist after one or two minor updates, and I agree.
Its as if there aren’t real people at Apple actually using and testing what they release (although I know that’s not the case)
For now my work around is long pressing the spacebar to get the cursor to where you want. :(
Text editing on iPhones is so not ideal! Why is it so hard to edit words, put punctuations and copy-paste text? Android is lightyears ahead in the game.
This has come up on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804 is the discussion on a post by a Google researcher on text editing and how it's fundamentally flawed on mobile devices.
> editing text is horrifically broken, has been since the first iPhone came out.
IIRC editing text was barely even possible when the phone first came out. No cut/paste! I think it arrived in the same software release as the app store.
Just trying to place the caret anywhere other than the end of the input field is guaranteed to cause frustration.
I frequently give up on writing things on my phone, saving them either for when I am at a computer with a real keyboard, or just not at all in many cases.
Still not great, but do you know about the spacebar trick? Anywhere the keyboard is open in iOS or iPadOS, press and hold the spacebar. The keyboard is now a trackpad and you can easily move the cursor. Incredibly bad discoverability but has been a big qol improvement for me.
This is my biggest pain point on the iPhone, and it’s somehow gotten worse in the last 1-2 years. Now it’ll sometimes insist on selecting certain words if I want to place the marker somewhere nearby, forcing a long press to bypass it.
All of this is very problematic and a good reason to skip the iPad despite it's exceptional hardware.
Personally, as mentioned in the article, the lack of multiple audio streams (or background audio) is very annoying. If you play any audio from Safari it completely pauses what your doing in other apps like YouTube or Twitch. So when you're done with Safari you have to go back into those apps and resume them.
Stage manager is glitchy on external displays. There are a lot of known shippable bugs in stage manager. Bugs that haven't been fixed in years.
Most unfortunately of all, as a utility, there's no developer tools. When you do software development for an iPad you usually have to put it into developer mode. Why not pull down Xcode, Xcode cli tools, and a terminal emulator as well as enable the developer section of the App Store as part of enabling developer mode? There's no reason for things not to work like this.
I would just like a way to simplify the iPad OS - my mum uses it to keep in touch with her kids, and when she accidentally enables multi-app mode, it inevitably results in a call to one of her kids to sort it out. Older people - even when they aren't disabled - don't have the fine motor control required to precisely aim their touches/swipes on the screen. She prefers her old iPad because it has a physical button - the swiping up gesture is a bit tricky for her.
I want an iPad that runs one app at a time, no hot corners, no swiping from edges.
Another comment mentions Assistive Access for the very dumbed down version, but you can also just disable the multitasking features in Settings if that’s the main issue
Ah good catch, they must have rearranged this when they added Stage Manager. It's more obvious now with its own "Multitasking & Gestures" in the top level settings categories, right above Accessibility.
There are three choices now: Off, Split View & Slide Over, or Stage Manager.
The real trick with Settings though is that it has a search bar at the top of the sidebar (with no visual indication that it exists unless you find it by scrolling up past the top), so you can always use that instead of hunting through the many pages of settings.
Parent commenter should probably turn off the 4-finger app switching gesture and the 3-finger undo/redo/copy/paste gestures as well. Doesn't seem like a feature their mom will be learning to use on purpose.
In the current version of iPadOS 17, you can turn off Split View & Slide Over (like you describe) but for years after their introduction I could find no way to turn them off after my spending hours Googling and navigating Settings. And my Googling surfaced many comments claiming that there is no way to turn them off.
Don’t know what to tell you, it’s been in there since iOS 9 when multitasking was first supported. it was originally in a Multitasking section within General settings.
It was there in iOS 9, in iPadOS 13 (the 9to5mac link posted yesterday), and is there today in iPadOS 17, but I'll concede I'm not spending the time to rule out that Apple took the option away during the year you were trying to turn it off and then they put it back afterward.
Android has tried to move in that direction as well, but at least they still offer you the option to create virtual home/back/multitask buttons at the bottom screen instead of gestures.
I've tried using Apples devices ever since they dropped the home button, but it always kinda ends up being way more fiddly than it has any right to be. Very often you just accidentally end up closing apps because of the hanging scroll gesture, which on non-gesture devices (read: configured Android and old iOS) just meant "scroll when needed" but on iOS/gesture controlled Android means "close the app". Especially annoying when reading large amounts of text.
Gesture control over buttons is one of those ideas that's neat but should never have been made the only option on iOS.
I, alongside seemingly everyone else, get frustrated that the OS doesn’t have more complex features. But for most of our moms, it’s probably better for them. The rest of us have macOS, Linux, etc.
There's absolutely no reason the iPad can't have both, as in a simple kiosk mode for old people to call someone, and then a "Power-user" toggle in the setting for those who want to enable the more complex features.
Why do old people need an iPhone or iPad just to call someone?
My mother in law insists on having the newest iPhone every year. It spends 95% of its time in the bottom of her purse, turned off. 1% of time is phone calls. The other 4% of its time is my MIL complaining about how complex it is while she laboriously dials a number. Realistically, she should just buy a dumb phone[0].
A complex tool like a smart phone or a computer has a duty to provide its user with the capabilities they need, even if providing such capabilities requires a complex UI. You can only make something as user friendly as possible. After a certain point, making something easier to use requires you to remove features.
This is why professional software, like CAD software or DAWs or programming languages, has a leaning curve. It is a tool that you are expected to have to learn to use. If your tool is too complex for your needs, return it and buy a simpler tool. Buying an iPad or iPhone just to make phone calls is like buying a stand mixer with all of the attachments when all you needed was a wooden spoon.
>Why do old people need an iPhone or iPad just to call someone?
Nobody said they do need it, it's just the HN trope that Apple devices are "so easy to use" that they'd somehow be better for the elderly, because devices form Windows and Android tend to nag you with more pop-ups and complex questions.
Because touch-based and mouse/trackpad based UIs are different enough to need separate support. An app optimized for one will look&feel much worse on the other. Remember Windows 8?
And what if I want to add them? Most likely other users would to if the SW support was there and you could run Mac apps on the iPad once you connected the keyboard and mouse.
I think I wasn’t very clear when I said “support”, my bad. Trying again…
Apps made for keyboard and mouse suck on touch&pen devices and vice versa (even if the device is basically able to run both) because most devs pick just one mode of interaction and optimize their UI for it, while the other mode is just “supported” as an afterthought.
That’s why I believe Apple decided to have separate devices for each mode of interaction, each with its own distinct OS&app ecosystem.
On the iPad I think the screen size makes stage manager unusable…but I have found stage manager hugely useful on my Mac with an ultra wide monitor along side Rectangle windows manager
iPhones are crazy now, there are so many types of interactions, press, hard press, double press, swipes in different directions. Press a program too hard and suddently icons start wobbling, the interface seems very undiscoverable to me.
My parents don't want any of these features, and to be honest I don't really want them either.
Having searched for and not found a reasonable cheat sheet, I made my own cheat sheet of all of the "gestures," laminated it, set it down for my mother. She still couldn't get it.
I think the gestures are just not a great way to go for the elderly, for a few reasons. First, gestures are not explicit, you have to discover them, be told about them, see them used by someone else. Second (and this one deserves subclassing) is motor control. Finger-tapping speed, for one, declines notably with age. Fine motor control, for the gestures, can also be impaired with age. Third, there's a lack of feedback when using gestures: no haptics, no titles to relay during phone calls, no "you just closed this program by swiping up!"
I'm on my 1st iphone after decades with Android and it's crazy how many secret gestures or taps there are with nothing telling you about them until you accidentally trigger them or look up how to do something.
Maybe my Samsungs had a lot of gestures I wasn't aware of but I feel like most things on the phone were very intuitive. Example, to end an incoming call and not just mute the ringtone you need to hit the power button. I didn't know about this for weeks and would drive around annoyed at a phone call ringing (but muted) in my car because it would stop my music playing.
On Android the buttons are right on the screen, I forget exactly but it's something like swipe left to mute, right to decline, etc.
I had to actually google "how to decline phone call on iphone" awhile back.. push the power button. If Android did that I'm pretty sure there'd be an arrow saying "PUSH THIS TO DECLINE."
And people in this post are talking about doing 3 finger taps. I didn't even know that was a thing..
I'll never forget the first time I accidentally turned on my flashlight at a dark movie theater and panicked because I hadn't learned that you can turn it on/off in the pull down bar yet. I think I had it on some button shortcut that if I hit a few times it'd turn on, and I didn't know what button I'd hit.
I was on Zoom with my mother playing cards recently. She often has trouble with accidentally closing the card game. I don't see how this problem could possibly be improved if it actually were impossible to have the card game open at the same time as Zoom. She would need half a dozen iPads.
(Of course, her solution often is to use a dedicated device for the card game and a dedicated device for Zoom, but this is an expensive solution for something the OS could be designed to handle well, and even if you can afford it it's a mediocre to bad solution.)
A simple mode can have togglable features as well (and all made simple).
You turn on simple mode, then you turn on split screen. All controls optimized to be simple, discoverable, and no hidden controls (as opposed to a normal mode, where all controls should be fast, intuitive, and keep you in a flow).
i'm a musician and audio engineer who encounters iPads for work regularly. my fine motor control is good enough to get paid to mix or play -- not good enough to reliably bring all open apps up (used to be a long press on the one button) so i can swipe one off screen to "close" it. feel for ya.
Try paying attention to the UI hints. When part of the previous app shows up on the left of the screen, that’s when you’ll get the app switcher.
Here’s a decent video showing the principle: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ewhAR7BmoMM Note that he lets go when the UI hint shows up on the left, but no earlier.
Yeah, how you control the iPad seems at odds with the job it's best at (and a big customer segment that wants a simple computer)
iPad has a physical disadvantage relative to iPhones and Macs which leads to a touch experience that never quite feels as assured or 'locked in' as the others.
The reason as I see it is that both Mac and iPhone you have much greater physical device stability, and this device stability allows the software to be more fluid and responsive.
For instance, the iPhone's app switch swipe gesture work really well in a one-handed device, since things are generally in reach and you have your fingers holding on the back of the device to stabilize it. As a result, you can switch apps very quickly.
That same app switching gesture feels awkward and is often mis-fired on iPad. The fluid responsiveness of the home bar and app switcher makes the whole experience feel less solid, because the device itself is less stable in-hand.
I think it may have been a mistake to port the home bar over to iPad, and they should have gone with either a physical button-based solution, or a press and hold then swipe solution. Specifically the bottom of the device that is closest to the user should not have anything trigger actions, that's the worst. Multitasking is also too easy to trigger, but that's not quite as bad. Notification & control center shades aren't that bad.
Either you have a stable device and a twitchy app switcher, or you have an unstable device and a solid app switcher. You can't have both be unstable.
(fwiw I'm a huge iPad fan as well as worked on a new tablet computer myself. I love the form factor but recognize it's fighting an uphill battle touch-wise)
Only tangentially related, but I always thought it was rather silly that only a few years after opening their billion dollar headquarters—that was in the shape the only remaining distinctive feature on iPhones—they chose to get rid of the home button in favor of what everyone else was doing. It seemed really rather silly. I miss the home button.
I too preferred the home button, not just for all the navigation features, but also because TouchID worked so well, and FaceID angers me basically every single time I have to use it.
FaceID was such a cool marketing gimmick that ended up a major pain in the ass.
When they announced it, I was so hyped because sometimes I had issues with TouchID (sweating finger after workouts, dirty finger when cooking, or damaged finger after swimming/handwork) but in practice it turned out to be so annoying.
It doesn't work when you don't look at it straight, it doesn't work when there is not enough light, it doesn't work when there is too much light...
Even if you disable the "require attention" setting, it is extremely annoying to unlock during driving (basically requiring you to take your head off the road) and it will randomly fail for no particular reason anyway.
To add insult to the injury, it makes Apple Pay a stupid 2-step process where you have to insistently look at your phone before putting it on the terminal.
I don't use my Apple Watch for Apple Pay either because it requires you to awkwardly twist your arm, since the signal can only go out from the glass display, because they chose aluminium for what is basically a sport watch (to make it look premium with no real benefits since the most vulnerable part get scratched/broken easily anyway).
I don't know why people keep giving so much benefit to Apple because the current user experience is really not good for the price of their stuff.
I guess I don't have to care because after I figure out what I want as an Apple Watch replacement, I'll switch to Android for my next phone.
I had exactly the same issues with TouchID, and also looked forward to FaceID for the same reasons, and I too was disappointed. However, I think that FaceID was noticeably improved by turning off the 'Require Attention for Face ID' setting. Perhaps it's something to do with wearing glasses? Maybe it was a placebo effect, but try it and see if it helps you.
Yeah, I know about that but I thought it was turned off and it wasn't.
So, I turned it back off, maybe it was re-enabled after a major update.
I hope it's going to improve things, it should, but I don't think it's going to solve the driving issue. I've looked to make an automation but as far as I can tell there is no way to change lock settings via automation (even just the duration of auto-locking).
Which is a general trend with Apple software nowadays. Too much focus on security at the cost of user freedom and ultimately functionality. They have made this automation software but so far, I have not found any use for it because there is always some limitation that makes it almost useless.
Shortcuts are also a major pain to "develop", Automator and AppleScript were painful but somehow, it's even worse.
Assistive Access is a distinctive iPadOS experience that makes it easier for people with cognitive disabilities to use iPad independently. Essential apps and experiences have been optimized for Assistive Access—items onscreen are bigger, features are more focused, and it’s easier to navigate and understand what actions are possible.
For remote management, there is kiosk mode (single app) that can be controlled by SimpleMDM et al, or local Apple Configurator.
The problem isn't features like multi-app mode. The problem is the nonexistent UI affordances. (And their converse, Apple's complete lack of discoverability... unless you count accidental gestures as 'discoverability,' I suppose.)
I'm constantly doing things with my iPad that I have no idea how to undo, other than by hitting the home button and starting over. I can't imagine how elderly and infirm people deal with these things.
I sort of feel the same way. All those invisible magic shortcuts make the device a bit arcane and they’re only there because apple refuses to include physical buttons. Like Face ID: please no. Give me back my finger print sensors
Thanks - I knew it was a setting back when the first version of split screen apps was introduced, then I would have sworn the setting was removed, and I don't know why I just assumed it still wasn't there.
For anyone else that wants to find it, just search for 'multi' in the settings app, and the third result will take you to the Multitasking & Gestures settings panel.
Bold move attempting to redirect/diffuse the point of the article by requesting the antithesis of it's asks. Bold courage asking for vastly more simplicity when point after point after point of this article is that iPadOS is positively tripping over itself with over simplifications abound.
I get that there's an argument to be made that the iPad OS's problems are due to over simplification, but I don't think that's what the article is saying - as I read it, the author is asking for fixing bugs and refinements. I think it hints at the core problem though: The OS designers are attempting to have it both ways. Is it possible to cater to both power users and novices equally well? I personally doubt it.
iPadOS is over-simplified in many ways, but not simple. It used to be simple, especially back around the original iPad Air. Now it's just complicated and too simplistic to do any real work.
Apple really, really needs to develop something similar to Samsung's DEX. They insist on keeping iPadOS on training wheels, while also making macOS more iPad-like (To its detriment imo).
What I think would satisfy a lot of users is if an iPad (And even an iPhone!) turned into a full-on Mac with full macOS with a keyboard and pointer attached. No need to create a convoluted hybrid touch+pointer UX that wouldn't be great at either, like Microsoft has proven. I simply want to be able to do more with the hardware I already own, and transfer files between my mobile/content consumption modes and when I'm creating/developing/working on something.
I know Apple just wants to sell more hardware, but what's happened instead is I've lost interest in getting an iPad altogether.
I think they've done the math on this one. They very heavily segment the market and most Apple users own several Apple devices. They fundamentally don't believe in the idea of one device being all things. This is also why their laptops don't have touchscreens.
I also don't think you can't bring all this to a device like an iPad and not alienate part of the existing market.
Apple's representatives have said, I believe under oath, that they don't know and don't calculate how profitable the App Store is [1]. So, keep that in mind when asserting whether or not Apple has done the math on something; for better or worse, nowadays I believe its for the worse far more often, they love operating on vibes.
Apple also hasn’t been afraid of cannibalizing their own market in favor of one with a bigger upside (eg iPod -> iPhone). It’s not that Apple has an aversion to multi-use devices, just that there is more upside to not having them.
Let’s take touchscreens for example. Apple doesn’t sell laptops with a touchscreen. Why? You suggested that it was because a touchscreen would threaten iPad sales.
I think that’s wrong and that the answer is simpler than that.
Apple doesn’t sell touchscreens because they want thin and light laptops. Touchscreens are heavy and thick. The math isn’t “adding a touchscreen will threaten iPad sales”. The math is “the market for a touchscreen laptop is smaller than the market for a super thin laptop”. Apple sells more laptops because they are super thin than they ever could if they added a touchscreen.
Why don’t they add a touchscreen as an option, you ask? Because they would need to have a different case to fit the touchscreen. And that would add more cost for not as much benefit.
I think this argument would hit a little harder if Apple hadn't just released their thinnest device ever that is sporting both a touchscreen and a dual layer OLED that's better than any of their laptop screens. I've never broken out the calipers but imo most of Apple's thinness comes from the body and not the screen. You could probably find a number of touchscreen laptops with similar thickness displays. On top of that you could compare the weights of non-touch and touch models, the 15.6" LG gram for instance gains 0.03lbs in the touch model.
You have it wrong. Apple doesn’t fundamentally believe in selling one device (do-it-all iPad Pro) as opposed to selling two (Mac + iPad). The segmentation is a business decision, nothing else.
Apple have multiple iPad lines and could easily limit a desktop class OS to the iPad Pro, a move I can almost guarantuee would alianate noone.
How do describe what it means to be an iPad? This is something that Apple cares about. If you have an iPad that is fundamentally different [more or device] then it's not really an iPad anymore.
Do they actually care? This sort of discrepancy has never bothered them before.
(see how the "Air" used to mean "ultra-premium thin and light", but now the iPad Air is heavier than the Pro, and the MacBook Air is just a brand they slap on the entry level MacBook, a model so entry level it's now sold at WalMart -- and the 15' Air is only 90 grams weight difference than the 14' Pro)
(see the "Apple Pencil" and how it means like 4 different things, with 4 different feature sets, and needs a product matrix spreadsheet to know which Pencil is safe to use with any given iPad)
See how "Apple TV" is both a hardware product (Apple TV 4K) and a service (Apple TV subscription) and an App (the Apple TV app, available on iOS, but also Roku and others), and a platform (the "Apple TV platform", where you can load other streaming services like Disney+ or Hulu or Paramount, into the Apple TV platform, which lives inside the Apple TV app, on your Apple TV device).
iPad
iPad Mini
iPad Air 11/13, USB3
iPad Pro 11/13, USB4
iPad Pro 11/13 1TB+, USB4, 16GB, extra CPU core, matte [Ultra?]
Optional Pencil, wired thin keyboard, wired magic keyboard+trackpad, wireless (less secure) 3rd party keyboard cases, external display with Stage Manager, virtual desktop with Sidecar, Lockdown mode for more security, HDMI input as standalone monitor, USB ethernet, realtime audio descriptions of live camera feed, Center Stage auto-follow human during video conferencing, ... the list goes on.
granted, I think they've invested so much into trackpad quality and software support, so much so that I think touchpad Macs are moot. On a PC laptop, where the trackpad is lowest bidder/afterthought, yeah, it kinda sorta makes sense but Mac touchpads are basically touchscreens without having to lift your arms.
No, they are nothing alike touchscreens. The whole and only point of a touchscreen is that you touch the actual visible thing on the screen (you touch the screen). Track pads, as good as they are, have 0 to do with that.
Just imagine if they offered a Mac without a keyboard, just the trackpad and the screen.
I wouldn't say they're nothing alike. The gestures developed for MacOS and the trackpad are paradigms derived from iPhone touch screens - swipe, pinch, zoom, tap to click (if turned on). And for the Mac, cognitively, at least with the cursor, the trackpad surface maps intuitively into the area of interest on the screen.
I agree, typing on a trackpad "keyboard" would suck, but on a Mac w/ a built in keyboard, that's superfluous. And who actually enjoys typing on an iPad on-screen keyboard?
If your use case allows for it there's nothing wrong with using the OS you find the most enjoyable to use. I find myself doing stuff on my PC frequently that either isn't practical or currently possible on an iPad (but in most cases would be on a Mac).
The only time I use my iPad over a laptop or something is for reading, watching videos or if I'm simply using it as a glorified ssh/rdp client to work on my other machines, but that's only if I want to consume media or read before I want to do anything else, which isn't often, and I don't generally put away my laptop to switch a tablet if the laptop can already do it.
Little things like the complete lack of multi-user support is why I don't ever hand it over to my kids or anything, they're insistent that it's a personal device and I find that unacceptable when they market it as a general computing replacement device that can't do something that has been available for decades everywhere else, even amongst their own products.. and that's without even going into having the ability to run software without Apple's blessing.. sideloading is not convenient and I've decided I'm no longer interested in buying a tablet or computer for myself that fights me on what software I can run on it.
iPad sales have been stagnant for over a decade now, and they were bringing in 30B in revenue in 2012. You're correct that these devices weren't designed for some people — Which is why they aren't buying them.
And why I'm suggesting they start making what the people want.
iPad sales aren't stagnating because people don't want them.
They are stagnating because the market is saturated.
The iPad is a "private" device, so there isn't any social pressure to have the latest model. You're not taking it out in public multiple times a day.
The use cases are also more limited, so even when the software support ends, there isn't that much incentive to upgrade. Streaming services still work, browser works and the drawing apps work, no point in getting a new one.
I've owned iPads since the 2nd gen and haven't had a single one's battery die on me. Every time the device physically broke (after being handed down twice) before the battery died.
The iPad is kind of just too good in a way. My mum uses a 2014 iPad Air 2. I bought it second hand for very cheap years ago. It still works perfectly fine. It’s been dropped several times on concrete and somehow didn’t smash. There is very little pressure to upgrade it to a newer one.
Right, despite my OP asking to be able to run iPadOS and macOS apps on one device depending on usage, what I must have actually wanted is a device that can do neither.
I mean, a Surface Pro starts at $800 (or closer to $1k for a proper setup) while an iPad $350. The vast majority of iPad sales likely come from the lower end. There is no way to compare their sales number.
The fact that it isn’t mentioned is probably a testament to how poorly it sells but Microsoft does have the Surface Go for $499 to compete with the iPad Air.
That can be turned around to say that it's you that doesn't want it. Again, sales have been stagnant for a decade, so the people have indeed spoken.
The iPad already is a tablet/computer hybrid, it just so happens to be kind of bad at it, which is why articles like these keep popping up. Apple already has an OS optimized for pointer control, just allow macOS to load up with the right hardware connected.
If you (or anyone else) doesn't want that experience... Don't? Nothing would be a forced change for anyone that doesn't want it.
An Apple 2 was $1300 in 1977. An Apple MacBook Air can be bought at walmart today for sub $700. Does that mean that Apple has shown a “sharp decline” in revenue over their baseline product by nearly $5600 per machine in inflation adjusted revenue?
Does inflation adjusted revenue actually matter if cost to produce is lower and their market share is stable?
Total iPad revenue is down both nominally and in real terms. Profit margins are a percent of revenue, so real revenue decline does actually matter and not something a business wants. You'd be laughed out of a boardroom if you suggested otherwise.
Nobody was talking about company-wide revenue, nor cross-comparing products like a desktop to a laptop, this is a discussion on the iPad.
>“sharp decline”
Misquote suggest this is no longer a productive conversation.
> Misquote suggest this is no longer a productive conversation.
That was a mistake, I had meant stark and u intentionally mistyped it and I had quoted it already, but I agree that the conversation is not productive. However, its unproductive not because of the misquote, but of one party’s seemingly misunderstanding or perhaps avoidance of things like cost improvement factors, new competitors entering the market, and other consumer buying behaviors that might be involved when a new type of product is released to the public in favor a single cherry picked metric.
Give some privacy on those android tablets and I’d have one. But android is scary for that. iPad = tablet that doesn’t make me worry about being studied and spied on
If anything, Microsoft has proven hybrid laptops are loved by enteprises, and they would even buy more Surfaces, if the Surface business unit wasn't having some drama due to the way Windows gets managed nowadays.
Disclaimer: I don't own an iPad so cannot test this.
Isn't UTM working on iPad? Looks like it according to UTM web pages. What prevents anyone to run MacOS or any Linux distro as a fullscreen VM on iPadOS like it was a regular laptop?
Maybe if you like DEX you should just buy DEX? I love the iPad I have and I don't need more ways to shoot myself in the foot, I have a computer for that
This is akin to telling people that want to load their own software/sideload apps to an iPhone to go buy an Android. It is neither what they asked for, nor something that'll impact you if you choose not to participate.
No, it is telling people "if you want a computer then get a computer". Perhaps one reason iPad is so insanely successful and a pleasure to use (compared to dex etc) is that it's specifically not one. Connect the dots.
Do you think Apple considers it "insanely successful" that the iPad has gone from over 41B in inflation-adjusted revenue over a decade ago, to 28B in 2023? Are articles like these pointing out the issues with the OS not a reflection that the product isn't meeting user's needs, and at least partially explaining the decline?
Lastly, do you think Apple shares your mantra of "If you want a [device] then get a [device]" when they developed the ability to run iOS/iPadOS apps on Apple Silicon Macs? iPads can run iOS apps too, why didn't Apple tell them to get an iOS device instead?
If you make a device that works and doesn't become quickly obsolete then yeah its sales will go down as more people get it.
> Lastly, do you think Apple shares your mantra of "If you want a [device] then get a [device]" when they developed the ability to run iOS/iPadOS apps on Apple Silicon Macs? iPads can run iOS apps too, why didn't Apple tell them to get an iOS device instead?
One is a computer, it's natural to give it more features but not the reverse...
Dex is basically an elaborate app. Telling people to buy a different device to get an app means there is a failure going on in what is offered. The dots don't connect.
I really don't have any issue with iPad being focused in non-technical users, but them Apple really should drop the "Pro" moniker in iPad and just stop using Apple Mx and go back to use Ax CPUs instead (and also, a sharp drop in price).
I think that is the main point of the article above, and also why so many people would want an iPad Pro to actually have Pro features [1].
[1]: Yes, I know about iPhone Pro, but at least iPhone Pro have some exclusive features that make sense for Pro users like USB 3.0 and ProRes camera features. However in the case of iPad Pro, what is actually the workflow that requires a better CPU? Final Cut? And that is it basically.
BTW, I would be happy if iPad OS at least exposed its hypervisor for applications, so UTM (https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/) would be useful in a non-jailbroken device.
But not even that, you are limited to using JIT unless you have a jailbroken device (or outdated versions of iOS).
A better SOC improves the workflow for music production, 3d modeling/sculpting, illustration, video editing, and probably many other pro workflows I'm not thinking of at the moment.
The fact that the iPad is a shitty development platform doesn't mean that it lacks pro features or people can't make use of the improvements to the CPU/GPU.
That as the article shows, are not that good because iPad OS sucks in lots of areas that Pros needs (e.g. File manager for people doing video editing).
I strongly agree with almost everything Federico complains about in this article, especially file management like you mention. It is a pain point. It doesn't mean iPads aren't great for a lot of these things.
I have different nitpicks about any system I use; it doesn't disqualify it from being legitimately good for X task.
> I strongly agree with almost everything Federico complains about in this article, especially file management like you mention. It is a pain point. It doesn't mean iPads aren't great for a lot of these things.
I think there is a difference between being "great" and "usable". I consider iPad usable for all those tasks, but to be great you actually need to offer more features to Pro users. Right now, the only Pro usage I think iPad are great is drawing, but in this case you can even get by with a first or second generation iPad Pro.
But maybe I am nitpicking, you are right that iPads are ok for some Pro users, but great would be too much.
I guess 'great' is pretty subjective. I think it's a great platform for musicians because it does things that either can't or aren't done on other platforms. One such example is the various touch interface based synthesizers like Borderlands Granular. It actually takes advantage of the form factor because it can assume it's a touch-based interfaced, unlike with Mac or PC.
It's not that it can't be made on PC; there's plenty of PCs with touch screens, but it's not.
It's also just very competent as a music making device in general. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass dealing with samples on iPadOS and iOS, which is why things like AudioShare [1] exist to help deal with the lackluster file management. But in most cases, you don't really need to touch that. There's a ton of great synthesizers, drum machines, and various different styles of music production groovebox/launchers/loopers/daws/mixers on it that just don't exist on other platforms. You can also use it to augment other platforms, through things like Logic Remote [2] or LK [3], which turns your iPad into a controller interface for Ableton Live.
It's not perfect, but neither is the Mac. or Linux or Windows or any other platform that is used for making music. I still think it's great, though.
It would be fine if there was a flurry of DEX tablets and a ton of competition in the market. Then the iPad could be a device on the side, the same way Apple monitors are a specific taste of monitors and very few people complain about what they can and cannot do.
Things is, there's very few competent tablets: basically two or three makers on the Windows side, the Samsung Ultra tablets, Xiaomi, and the iPad Pro. And right now the future or the Surface Pro line is pretty dicy, so the iPad becoming more competent would be more than welcome.
To your point, there could be more differenciation between the "pro" line and the regular iPads.
Pro work can be done in iPad. Audio production, photo processing, painting, 3D modeling and what have you.
The only pro thing that is being complained about here is programming but hey most people are not programmers. Don't let the HN echo chamber mislead you...
There is a lot of gotcha outside of the obvious stuff.
For instance iOS's process management model means your program gets suspended if it goes too long in the background. Let's say you want to write an email in fullscreen while exporting your superb 4K movie in the background, tough luck.
Idem if you want to have multiple programs running video content in parrallel (or even look at multiple videos at the same time. Short of using a dedicated app, the default ones won't help you)
The browser situation could get resolved as the EU has pressured Apple to do it, but there is still a lot of things that could get improved to help power users, even outside of our circles.
I suspect they want to expand the apple control of ios/ipados to the mac, instead of the user control of macos to ios/ipados (and the commercial non-control).
I don't like it. My purchasing habits wrt apple products has diminished and is now near zero.
Without their nonsense, I would purchase mac products without thinking as a trusted tool.
I don't understand this comment. Apple has will for many things. They could give you a rubber room to build software on a mac or even an ipad, but keep strings attached and not let you run it without asking permission (like ios now)
and "consumers" could continue, while more creative types (the crazy ones) could have a way to allow a few of their own binaries to run in the way they want.
This year really feels like the time to do something exciting with the iPad, so soon after launching an absurdly powerful iPad Pro. Either macOS in a VM or a major revamp of iPadOS.
There's an exciting story to tell about the iPad Pro being a hybrid tablet, a next gen Mac, the best of both worlds. Or they could do nothing, and let it remain a boring niche product with a really nice screen. We'll see.
I mean the iPad with M2 was also absurdly powerful. And I remember people speculating that they'd finally make iPadOS usable when they released the iPad Pro with M1, the first iPad with a laptop chip instead of a phone chip.
That doesn't mean it won't happen this time, I certainly hope it does.
Multitasking for pro users doesn’t generate more recurring subscription revenue, which is the only thing Apple cares about now, because it’s the only way for the company to grow their overall revenue.
Everyone who is going to have an iPhone or iPad already has one.
More services that cause automatic recurring revenue.
Last I checked, Apple has:
Apple Pay
Apple Card
AppleCare+
AppleCare Help Desk Support
AppleCare OS Support
AppleCare for Enterprise
Apple Messages for Business (not sure if this one is paid or free)
Fitness+
Apple TV+
MLS Season Pass
iCloud+
Apple News+
Apple Music
Apple Arcade
iPhone Upgrade Program
Apple Developer Program
Apple Developer Enterprise Program
Apple One
...and there are probably a few more I’m missing.
I’m surprised they haven’t figured out a way to charge a monthly fee for iMessage and FaceTime yet (beyond of course the usual nagging you for iCloud storage upgrades to store backups all of the attachments you’ve been iMessaged).
I'm leaning towards the latter (+ a bunch of AI bullshit). Thankfully we're at least getting alternative app stores for iPadOS in the EU, so there's at least some exciting things happening with iPadOS no matter what Apple decides to do.
The iPad Pro is the most wasted potential of any device right now. Single core speed like a i9 14th gen, but the device is so limited no AAA games selection, desktop apps, or anything. This thing could literally be running desktop-class COD / Fortnite/ Photoshop/ VScode / Xcode but Apple won't let it.
Apple is caught between a rock and a hard place here. On one hand, probably the vast majority of ipad users don't know multitasking exists, have never even opened the Files app, don't care about the lack of system utilities, and use the iPad as a simple big phone. On the other hand, they've been trying to sell these "pro" devices with impressive hardware to target a small market of consumers with "professional" workflows, who do care about all of these things.
My view is that, fundamentally, a lot of "professional" workflows is just as much about shuffling data around as it is working on said data. Just as data science taught us that data cleaning is 80% of the job, the same applies to video editing, programming, etc. iPadOS is uniquely bad at moving data around due to its onerous requirements around sandboxing and its poor interfaces around inter-app communication, when these are precisely the things that are most needed.
And then there's the multitasking, which remains terrible to this day. Can they improve it? Definitely, but I wouldn't want to be the guy trying to figure out how to do it without ruining the normal user experience.
Preview is honestly such a good app. On top of everything else, it's also a very powerful PDF editor, which is something many companies built full paid products around — but on macOS you get it for free.
Preview, especially the .pdf editor, is probably the biggest feature I miss when using Windows instead of MacOS. I still don't get, how there isn't a comparable .pdf editor (that I know of) for Windows. The integrated one in Edge is fine for just reading things or highlighting something, but for adding notes, text or even just censoring things it is way worse than Preview.
Microsoft is updating it's Surface hardware with ARM chips in a couple of weeks. This would include the Surface Pro 10, which is otherwise excellent save for poor ergonomics if actually laying down and using it on your lap. If they could fix this, it would serve the population looking for a hybrid tablet/laptop device well. (it will also have an oled screen in this upcoming update).
Yes, its Windows, but I much prefer the file manager in Windows to Mac, and definitely over ipadOS. They will also be announcing AI related updates in 2 weeks, and I get the feeling MSFT has leapfrogged apple by a year or two on this count.
what is hostile about Windows 11? I'd agree its not the best on non MSFT devices (McAfee anyone?) but on the Surface devices i've found it to run fairly well.
It's not as polished as MacOS, but given I mostly operate in the world of web browsers and Office 365, with a couple of Windows based desktop apps, it gets the job done rather well. Would expect major update of Windows 11 later this year, leading into Windows 12.
I know it can be turned off, but personally I find myself to be able to focus and get more work done without having imessages on my laptop. I can see how some people might feel otherwise though.
I actually really like Windows 11. In most ways it's as good as macOS, though I think the macOS ecosystem is a bit nicer (e.g. native apps are better, prettier, more consistent).
But, I don't like that ads are in the start menu, that I'm asked to try out Microsoft Edge, or that the built-in search checks the web rather than sticking to my PC.
There's a lot of small points of friction, and it seems that after every major update a new one is added, or my old preferences are ignored. For many of these settings, you need to go into less familiar tools like the group policy editor as opposed to the built-in Settings app.
It feels gross to have paid $200 for a Windows 11 Pro license to then be shoved ads.
This is true. The ads are unnecessary. I don’t understand the stranglehold mcafee has on pc manufacturers. And constantly trying to shove me to edge is annoying, even though I don’t find edge to be too bad as a browser.
While they are some annoyances, I also find Windows 11 to be pretty good (I was a lifelong Mac user previously).
And I don't get any ADS after disabling the weather widget so I don't know where you find them really. I literally have zero ads, besides the small nudge to make edge the default browser sometimes when I open it.
Apple is just as bad, routinely having a notification offering me a trial of Apple Fitness even though there is no way I would ever buy that because there is no way I'm going to pay 10 euros a month to have workout planning to use an Apple Watch I already bought from them for a decent amount of money (devices in this price range have this type of stuff built-in).
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft gets a small pass for the nagging, because at least I didn't even spend a lot of money with them since I didn't buy my windows computer from them.
But Apple is a big no-no. No way you upsell me after selling me a deeply flawed device (partly because the software is an unfocused mess and lacking in many ways, partly because the hardware is not that good for the price).
Surely one can run some sort of Linux disto on these surfaces, no?
I would imagine support might not be 1:1 with all the features as Windows 11 might support, but probably good enough. It'd be a sacrifice I'd be willing to live with.
When I last checked in on Linux running on a 2-in-1 a year or two ago it wasn't good. There are some minor hardware issues with Surfaces specifically (webcam and some other random stuff doesn't work without a ton a work) but what really killed it was the X/Wayland mess. Had tons of showstoppers in tablet mode because some applications wouldn't recognize the OSK, or would trap me in an dialog until I grabbed a mouse and keyboard. There were some distros who's login screen was unusable when touch only as well, but I'd have to dig up my notes to remember which one. Might be time soon for another tablet experience roundup now that there's a new Ubuntu LTS out.
I haven't tried since the Surface Pro 3, so maybe this has changed, but the answer was "yes with major caveats". A quick search suggests this is still the answer. Several bits of hardware[0] still rely on drivers that haven't been upstreamed to the Linux kernel proper yet, so you'd best be prepared to run a custom kernel. Some things like the webcam don't work at all.
And then there's booting. You will probably have to monkey with secure boot, which means dual booting can be a pain. Big, popular distros are starting to support secure boot, so it might just work, but it might not. And I'd be kind of shocked if MS didn't take the opportunity to ditch legacy x86 baggage[1] to completely lock down boot and make it impossible to run anything but Windows.
In summary, on older Surface devices, yes you can run Linux but you have to pretend it's 20 years ago and Linux is still a pain to get running. On ARM? Good luck.
[0] basically all input methods. Touchpad, keyboard, touch, and pen.
File manager in macos is better imo because its just a unix distro under the hood with a sexy gui, and you don’t need to learn powershell or install wsl. It works out of the box. Same old bash you always knew.
I believe the biggest barrier here is the background processes (and true inter-app communication that'd come with it).
Many pro apps have either plugins and/or interoperability with other apps/extensions on the desktop.
In iPad, even if you have the app (e.g. Logic, Resolve, FCP) it's very hard to create a "real" experience like the desktop with file/plugin interoperability or a true ecosystem. In addition, this is why we don't have any developer tools that'd actually be anything of a daily driver (rather a proof of concept).
If we get true multitasking/background tasks, then I believe many other pro apps will jump onboard.
The hardware is absolutely fantastic, the SoC is more than capable. We just need the software support.
Apple already has processes in place for background process execution on iPhones and iPads [1], including a way for the app to request additional background processing time [2]. The issue is that this system needs to be expanded to cover the use cases that people are describing. It really is hard to understand why Apple has not done so nor given any indication that they will.
> Apps don’t normally receive any extra execution time after they enter the background. However, UIKit does grant execution time to apps that support any of the following time-sensitive capabilities:
* Audio communication using AirPlay, or Picture in Picture video.
* Location-sensitive services for users.
* Voice over IP.
* Communication with an external accessory.
* Communication with Bluetooth LE accessories, or conversion of the device into a Bluetooth LE accessory.
* Regular updates from a server.
* Support for Apple Push Notification service (APNs).
> Enable the Background Modes capability in Xcode if your app supports background features.
Keeping an SSH session alive is barely outside of the existing use cases. Long-running export jobs and things like that would need a new use case defined, perhaps with QoS definitions.
Yup those existed for a long time, though I think we need some entitlement for "app-to-app" or "arbitrary extension" kind of background processing/serving.
The existing ones, while welcome, are not enough for many pro cases. The closest is inter-app audio, which was a good addition but perhaps not extensive enough.
That's probably the reason, and has obvious sandboxing/stability benefits.
Though for iPad to be truly "Pro", there needs to be adjustments made, perhaps through entitlements or some shared storage between apps (user-chosen apps, not necessarily from the same developer as that already exists) or something similar.
I really agree with the author that the background utilities and lack of multitasking sucks on iPad, but I also think that the locked down nature of iPad OS is very limiting.
I feel that I actually want a locked down operating system on my phone where the privacy implications are just to high, but on a computer or tablet, I prefer the more open operating system and find the walled garden so limiting. You really can’t run python or code on it and it doesn’t offer the same apps that make the Mac so amazing like raycast, etc.
This is true for both iOS and iPadOS -- they way they handle security for links.
Example: I have Youtube installed on the i*device. I click on a Youtube link and it opens in a webview, but doesn't know who I am. I'm logged in via the app, and I'm logged in via Safari, but in the protected webview, it doesn't know. Sometimes it's easy to click on the "Open in App" link, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. If I try to login, then the system sends me to login via Google, which will then send me over to Gmail for MFA validation.
This can't be. It doesn't work like this on macOS. The security model is hell.
This is one of the most mind-boggling parts of Apple’s mobile OS. Why are they allowing apps to jail unrelated parts of the mobile experience? They’re so strict, yet they allow completely unnecessary web views. Photos galleries are another incredibly painful point. Every app thinks they can reinvent the photo picker, for absolutely no reason.
This happens in Android too and it's a little annoying too. If the app is using a certain web view tech (Android has a few) then it enables a frame using your default browser and an option to "Open in (...)" which correctly pops open the YT app. If it's an older web view sometimes it's just impossible - sometimes a share action will work, other times there is a link on the page.
Sometimes I'm logged in (I guess one of those web views got logged into at one point) and then I can watch a few seconds, manually open the app, go into history and restart it proper.
Lack of background apps alone kills remoting via SSH.
Another gripe I have is lack of keyboard shortcut consistency. MacOS apps are encouraged through the API and defaults to provide keyboard shortcuts for all actions. On iOS most Apps don't implement them at all. Gmail app is the worst example.
I work with seniors helping them navigate online life and by choice specialise in ipad and iPhone owners. All of them miss skuomorphic elements and clear signals of what is and what is not an active touchable region.
Apple don't manage pre- digital seniors well. With lots of emerging functional loss if not outright dementia, these devices are confusing.
I would love to talk to Apple UX about some of the inconsistency.
Man people love to hate the iPad. I agree many of these critiques (though it seems odd to complain about the lack of TextEdit and then describe the notes app so precisely).
I still use my iPad (and I imagine the author does to) because there are things it does SO much better than a computer — even beyond consumption.
Using the Apple Pencil with apps like Notability, Procreate and Lightroom is IMHO so much better than the equivalent experience on desktop.
Notetaking on computers has been sorely lacking basically forever. Being able to quickly take notes, interspersed with sketches, arrows, and symbols, and layout the page exactly how I want — just how I’d do it in a physical notebook — is awesome.
The apple pencil is just alright. The design decisions they made to have it magnetically attach to the device, while cool, mean that its not a very ergonomic implement for long term use. For comparison check out the shape of the Wacom Pro Pen 2.
I can use the pro pen 2 all day and not feel issues with my fingers or wrists. The apple pencil requires me to use some goofy silicone addons to make it ergonomically functional if you plan to use it for more than an hour. Plus those add ons get in the way of mounting the pencil magnetically, often get in the way of using the touch buttons, and limit what cases you might use.
This is the silicone add on I use, which ergonomically makes the apple pencil an actual functional tool that doesn't hurt hand/fingers/wrists.
The apple pencil is a pretty 'ok' tool if all you're doing is the occasional sketch. The apple pencil + ipad is a nice drawing platform because its almost always the one you have with you.
It's not so much better than a dedicated drawing platform on computer - a proper wacom drawing display. But thats a dedicated device, and costs as much as an ipad, so you pay more for the better product + the computer.
I tried my hardest to love the ipad + pencil workflow for work, but ultimately I crawled back to my windows ultrabook setup. While the taking notes part is great, its all the other workflows that don't seem to fit in (for me). While taking notes, I need to lookup a technical term or have some document open, or load up a project planning tool to enter task related notes, etc. Other times, I need to review/mark-up/highlight technical documents, some of them are in an email, some are in sharepoint, some are on my desktop. Some are controlled documents that I can only use through a separate document warehouse system, etc, etc.
I have to imagine Apple is working (very long-term, slowly) towards either a unified OS or a true overhaul of ipadOS that addresses the concerns. They just are fundamentally not incentivized to actually fix the problem. People will just buy both.
Also, who is really the market for an ipad pro. The average consumer is going to want a cheap ipad model for media and game consumption on the go. Ipad pro is for creatives or tech enthusiasts with disposable income; in either scenario, owning both ipad and Macbook is fairly likely, and they do work well as complementary devices.
I'm still using a 2018 ipad pro. it has the modern design and modern keyboard and flies through everything. I use it to look at slack sometimes. It's pretty pointless to me as primarily a macbook user and I don't see any reason whatsoever to upgrade it.
Soon it will stop upgrading the OS and then the apps will stop working and then AppStore itself will stop working as well. Apple services will stop working as well.
I have a perfectly good Mac mini (32gb ram, intel based) but after I’ve updated the iOS on my iPhone the account stopped working on Mac mini. It says I need to upgrade the OS in order to use apple services(I.e iCloud, mail etc) but there is no OS upgrade option for the old Mac mini
You may have success running new enough macOS with OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I use it to run macOS Sonora (current latest version) on a 2015 MacBook Pro (Intel) and it works fine. It’s technically a MacBook Pro 12,1 and I spoof a MacBook Pro 15,2 with OCLP relatively easily with the GUI tool, and mostly all the features I want from the upgraded macOS like handoff etc work. Features that require updated macOS like Contact Key Verification also do work.
Some features that require ARM processors don’t work; for instance, I can’t install or run iOS/iPadOS apps from the App Store, unfortunately, but I don’t really need to do that very badly.
The fact that you have to do that just to keep compatibility with newer hardware that your purchase from them is just bonkers.
Then you realize that you probably shouldn't use their service if you can keep up with the discretionary spending on their hardware, they would like you to do (as far as they are concerned, Apple users only have one thing to buy: more Apple hardware).
But then you realize that if you need to use other services/apps they don't work that well on their platform and simply would work just as good or better on any other hardware.
Then you install Windows and figure out an Android phone will offer you the same type of integration, just in a less polished way. And you figure out you will save over 2K euros in a 10-years period and it will be much cooler to take some holidays (or whatever) instead of engrossing Apple shareholders.
Congrats, you found the get out of jail free card...
I mean, I guess if you want longterm backward compatibility, you should run Linux, which you can do on Apple hardware.
Apple deserves some blame for failing to maintain the drivers for legacy Intel hardware in modern macOS, which is what the OCLP software seeks to reimplement and restore, which is no small feat. The group maintaining the software deserves all the praise they get for doing what Apple doesn’t.
All that said, macOS on Apple hardware is the best native operating system experience today in my opinion. The trackpad alone remains the major differentiating factor, but the aluminum unibody construction is also a major plus. Running Linux on Apple hardware somehow makes the trackpad just as janky as running Windows on Apple hardware, and Windows trackpads are generally janky due to OEM hardware/drivers being garbage, so it seems that the issue is both hardware and driver related, as running macOS on non-Apple hardware also suffers from jankiness.
Windows and Android are not really suitable alternatives to Apple hardware. The build quality just isn’t the same, and there isn’t really anything like AppleCare or iCloud. Windows 11 is adding literal ads in the chrome. At least Android lets you sideload apps and ideally root your device. The EU is correctly rectifying that issue in iOS and iPadOS, but Apple is dragging their feet via malicious compliance and willful misinterpretation of DMA requirements.
Two thousand euros over a 10 year period is not really a bad price to pay for a device you use probably every day. That cheaper alternatives exist isn’t really the point, as the quality of alternatives isn’t at all comparable. I say this as someone who has professionally used, repaired, maintained, deployed, and trained people to use Windows, Macs, iOS/iPadOS, and Android for over 10 years. I use what suits the use case, budget, and preferences of individuals and groups to meet their needs, goals, and expectations.
I'm not sure why your iCloud account would stop working on old devices. I can still log into devices with Mac OS 10.11 with my iCloud account. Maybe because MFA was introduced a few years ago?
But like the previous comment said you can use OCLP to install new versions of MacOS on "unsupported hardware". Usually you can go 2-3 versions of newer MacOS without any issue. Beyond that little things will start breaking, but it will still be functional.
I run the newest versions of Sonoma on a 2010 iMac (that I upgraded to a quad core CPU, Metal capable GPU, and 32GB of RAM), a 2012 Mac Pro 5,1 (also upgraded to dual 3.46GHZ CPUs, RX 580, and 64GB RAM), and a 2009 MacBook Pro (SSD, and RAM Upgraded).
At some point security updates to iCloud logins break older systems. They don't intentionally break it when an OS goes out of support, but they don't fix it anymore, either.
There are versions of iOS on iPhone that can't do iCloud-stuff anymore.
Generally because the versions of SSL/TLS are outdated on those devices and so either need modern cryptographic libraries installed on them or they just cannot connect to ansy modern server.
I can either use the apple account on the latest iOS or on the old Mac mini but not on both. Basically when I’ve tried to log in on the iPhone it told me I need to upgrade the Mac mini or remove it if I want to use the account on my iPhone. Obviously I removed the account from Mac mini. Perhaps I can create new account specifically for Mac mini but what’s the point to have different iCloud iMac accounts for each device? I’m confident but at some point this trick will stop working as well.
I’m a high school classroom teacher and I use the iPad Pro for note taking, and sometimes AR to visualize systems of linear equations in 3D using Geogebra. I use Desmos all the time for 2D stuff as well.
All of that can be done on a non-pro device but I got the pro for the screen. Having a 13” screen with a high refresh rate is huge. Last year I asked the school to buy me an iPad because I didn’t like that I was using my personal device for professional use. But they bought a base model with a small 60hz screen. I find it completely unusable and haven’t touched it since I loaded my note taking software on it. Now it’s a glorified timer for exams.
I don't think Apple cares much about improving ipad OS and instead use this form factor to test and scale new technology to be used in products they care much more about, iphones and macbooks. For example, 120Hz Pro Motion, liquid retina, and now the tandem OLED in the latest model all went to ipad first.
It is a restricted consumer device. Basic computer functionality can often only be added with pay as you go subscription “apps” making the device a parody of a personal computer.
iPad has gotten better compared to the early days but still remains a device designed around consuming content. It is great at consuming content, books, movies, comics, reading headlines .. etc.
Every Apple review I read reminds me of Russians doing videos begging Putin for things that he definitely won't ever care about.
>First, as I’ve said multiple times, I love my iPad and want the platform to get better. If you care about something or someone, sometimes you have to tell them what’s wrong in order to improve and find a new path forward. I hope this story can serve as a reference for those with the power to steer iPadOS in a different direction in the future.
Then goes on to list a million reasons that it sucks, and has sucked for the last 12 years!
But Apple isn't a dictator and you don't have to stay with them.
If it doesn't do what you want, buy what does.
Or just don't buy a product that you know won't do what you want.
As an aside, both my Android phone from 5 years ago, and my Android tablet, do everything that he complains about his expensive ipad not doing (the only thing I'm not sure about is recording Skype calls).
That's what has been promised for 2024 Aug/Sep shipping devices, including mainline Linux support and Arm SystemReady UEFI booting of any compliant Arm distro, on laptops and/or tablets from Microsoft, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and more.
Pricing is an open question, but even if the initial devices are "premium" due to post-IPO Arm licensing tax on Qualcomm, competition between multiple PC vendors and Apple will be good for everyone
In a year or two, hopefully that means Framework Arm devices with power and performance >= early Apple Silicon devices.
That will never happen, at least not at a scale that is a sustainable business, hence why after Netbooks, all OEMs went with ChromeOS and Android instead.
Plenty of commercial factors that the community isn't willing to compromise on, hence we only get those products that only kind of work, for tech savy communities.
The iPad’s hardware is so far beyond every other tablet ever made that it isn’t really reasonable to categorize it as a “tablet”: it’s an iPad. It’s a horse of a different color.
If you want an iPad, only Apple sells them. If you want a tablet (a different class of device that is nowhere near as useful or high quality as an iPad) then yes, you can buy them from other manufacturers.
Nobody but nobody is making hardware on the level of the current iPhones, iPads, and Macbooks. It’s not even remotely close. I bought a top of the line Dell “ultrabook” not long ago and half of the functionality felt like I had traveled back in time to the 90s.
Not sure what you're talking about here. Seems like the Apple reality distortion ignorance field.
Lol, the gatekeeping of your post to say the iPad is not a tablet.
All I want in a tablet is a nice screen, fast CPU, and quick switching between apps.
I want those things OP complained about in the article to work (background apps/multitasking/background audio etc).
For me the tablet is a media consumption device. I write notes in Obsidian a tiny bit, but I want a keyboard to do any real work. I can use a bluetooth keyboard if I want.
I have no complaints about my tablet now. It even has a headphone jack.
I can put youtube (revanced, adblocked and sponsorblocked) on a split screen with reddit below.
I can use Firefox with adblock.
I can ssh and vnc to my servers.
I auto-sync files with my own servers using Syncthing.
iPad can't do those things.
What magic features does an iPad have? A pen? The absolute worst input method imaginable.
I had a pen on my OG Samsung Galaxy Note from 2011, and I never used it. Also on the Note 3, also never used that, because Pens suck.
More cameras I won't use? No thanks. I have very good cameras on my phone that is always with me, and a dedicated mirrorless for when I care to take really good photos.
I recognize that I'm obviously not the target market for iPad Pro - I don't want to hold a screen that big while sitting on the couch.
But from reading your post, the market for iPad Pro appears to be people ignorant enough to be deluded that it's so different and somehow "better quality" than any other tablet.
Then you read the actual article to see exactly how deluded they are.
IpadOS sounds like a shit show.
Literally the only thing Apple has that I am somewhat jealous of is battery efficiency of the fanless macbooks.
I want a fanless laptop (am I even permitted to call a macbook a laptop when it's so clearly superior to your Dell laptop? lol), but I won't suffer Apple to get one.
I don't even use my laptop except if I take it when I go away on holidays. But it's not in any way lower quality than macbooks.
Linux/Windows laptops should be fanless soon I hope.
The only quality Apple has over other manufacturers is the quality of their marketing.
> All I want in a tablet is a nice screen, fast CPU, and quick switching between apps.
> What magic features does an iPad have?
> I am somewhat jealous of is battery efficiency of the fanless macbooks.
I want good battery efficiency on my tablets as well, and I doubt any Android tablet could match that. It's a tablet for god's sake, the whole point is to not have to tether it to a power outlet for any prolonged duration of work.
If you want real pain, try being an iPad Mini owner! I love the format which is perfect for slinging in a backpack or bag and not having to worry (too much) about pulling out a newly-bent device. I briefly invested in a full-size iPad and quickly exchanged it for another Mini. To me, the Mini represents the ideal compromise between size and usability.
Regarding pain, not only do Apple largely ignore the device, but accessory manufacturers seem to follow suit. I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to buy a must-have accessory without success. I'm hoping that Apple won't be killing it off any time soon- I'd hate to have to over to the dark side...
I recently had to downgrade my phone for a few days to an original iphone SE, 6s internals basically A9 chip. It was noticeably faster in the ux than my current A13 phone. Makes no sense to me. I type “cal” in spotlight on the A9 phone and I get calendar returned almost instantly. I do the same on the A13 and there’s a few seconds of delay before any results show, but get this I can’t even get calendar to return, only calculator and google calendar that isn’t even installed.
So considering that new phones aren’t always faster than the old ones where it actually counts (the ux), how are these newer gen ipads fairing? Do they actually feel like upgrades?
I really don’t have very many apps installed. A9 phone had more installed actually. I believe it was running ios 13 though so maybe the older oss were just better.
> I’m looking forward to the new iPad Pros, but I can’t shake the feeling that the same old iPadOS cycle is about to begin all over again.
This is EXACTLY how I feel. WWDC will roll around and Apple will completely drop the ball for yet another year with iPadOS.
I also feel that the iPad Pro is one of the best hardware form factors for a computer — but iPadOS makes it a not great laptop replacement. I can’t help but feel like it would look incredibly foolish for Apple to do their May iPad event announcing M4 iPads — only to find out at WWDC that iPadOS still sucks.
Thankfully, it seems like most people, tech reviewers, etc. are vocal about iPadOS missing the mark. I hope Apple doesn’t continue to ignore the negative feedback.
Some days I agree with that sentiment. But then I remind myself that I treat my iPad as a task device. In this context, task and app are somewhat synonymous.
I've a short list of tasks:
Apple TV: for task "watch Apple TV+"
Safari: for task "surf internet"
Google Maps: for task "surf geography"
Animoog Z: for task "make music"
While for sure I would love ipadOS to be a real OS, as long as it's the best device for even one task that I do regularly, I'll probably keep buying new ipads - but generally only once every four years, as I get my boost for my tasks from new hardware.
I don't know why anyone would want to force a square peg into a round hole using an iPad as an actual computer. The Macbook Air is nearly identical in size, battery life etc.
i would love to use vscode in the ipad. one barrier to having a similar experience one the mac is its filesystem. the Files app is nowhere near Finder in terms of utility.
when riding a bus in singapore, or flying short-distance, i feel awkward using my macbook. whereas if i use an ipad, i feel like it's more appropriate. this is just a personal preference though.
another thing i'd love for ipads to have is, allowing its display to be used as an external monitor.
The iPad is a bit of tragedy. If it was an open platform, a lot of its problems would be solved - first by third-party software, and later perhaps by Apple copying those successful features/solutions. Because the iPad is a walled garden, it's at the mercy of Apple's narrow vision for how it can be used.
It's true, iPadOS does have ludicrous limitations. I cannot tell whether that's out of sheer incompetence or the greed for subsequent monetization opportunities.
Weren't they working on bringing full MacOS to iPad Pro's it seems like the new iPad pro would have been perfect time to just allow us to run OSX on ipad pros
I’ve been using iPad Pro with keyboard and there are strange limitations indeed, like I can’t submit a Discord or FB post with keyboard alone, I need to use a pointer.
Apple locks down the platform which means others can’t contribute, but then isn’t capable enough to fill all the roles it takes to make a professional platform.
I just don't get the obsession some people have for the iPad, jumping through hoops and putting up with so many compromises when most issues are solved using a laptop. Can someone explain this? I have an iPad but I primarily use it for watching films, I wouldn't dream of trying to get any work done on it when I have a Macbook.
Ipads/tablets are very common business devices used for a variety of applications. We issue ipads to our field techs to do inspection checklists, take pictures at job sites, write notes, etc. Its a great device for that.
Same. I get annoyed on systems where I have to use a mouse when I know keyboard shortcuts would be faster and more efficient, so having to do everything through a touchscreen is infuriating. And some people will say "well that's why you can buy a keyboard ..." so then it's a laptop, just not a great one. What's the point? ipad has always felt like a weird middle ground without an obvious niche, at least for my use.
Not everyone has the same view as you. There are plenty of segments that Apple caters to including captive devices for field techs, education, retail, kiosks etc.
It's sad to see so much effort put into reviews like this when it's obvious Apple keeps iPadOS kneecapped on purpose to prevent cannibalization of MacBook sales. All of the author's hopes and dreams are naught when Apple simply doesn't want to fix any of the issues pointed out.
> Apple keeps iPadOS kneecapped on purpose to prevent cannibalization of MacBook sales
[Citation needed]
I don't buy this argument. And I also don't buy that iPadOS is "kneecapped". They're different operating systems for different uses. I'd hate for macOS to gain touch support, since it would ruin it for mouse and keyboard usage, just as happened to Windows, Gnome, and other desktop UIs.
The basic kindergarten math that having your customers need to buy an iPad plus a MacBook to have their needs covered, instead of just an iPad with more power-user features or just a MacBook with a touchscreen, equals more profits for them.
Do you really need a citation that Apple would much rather make more money rather than less?
iPad Pro 1TB is the cheapest model with 16GB RAM for virtualization. With a Macbook-lookalike Magic Keyboard, it costs about two MacBook Airs or MacBook Air + iPad Air. If it ran MacOS VMs, it would be revenue neutral for Apple hardware, without forcing customers onto Qualcomm Nuvia devices to get a professional developer Terminal on a portable, instant-on, AI device.
In general as a hacker I'm skeptical when people are trying to draw distinctions between systems when there is little apparent technical merit to the distinction. I tend to believe in adaptability & flexibility, tend to believe in soft systems and the drive or quest to be more. The arguments that devices must in some zero sumanmer stay one thing or else seems concocted.
Windows with touch support looks like normal windows. It just means I can tap and pinch instead of using a mouse (really nice for google map or just to move around in a creative app). macOS doesn’t have to change drastically to work well with touch support
I don’t see discussion of this elsewhere, so: the Magic Keyboard isn’t good.
In some senses, yeah, it’s amazing. But I use the f keys all the time normally. I use esc all the time. The keyboard lacks both. It makes the iPad heavier than my laptop, ruins the pick up and use character; the pencil goes flying if you’re not really careful when carrying it; and you still can’t use it in many circumstances on the couch because of the weight balancing and you have to cradle it.
It stops it from being a tablet and turns it into an un-ergonomic laptop
Perhaps I'm just a 23 year old boomer, but the idea of an iPad as a computer replacement doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, there are lots of apps on the App Store, but it doesn't have everything.
I'd rather use a Chromebook (though, not the cheapest ones) so that there's guaranteed web app compatibility. And I've still got an App Store to do my taxes (or whatever people use their iPads for, I dunno)
I agree iPadOS is not good enough, but when I hear people call for Apple to merge devices and troll them for maximizing profits, I have to roll my eyes.
Okay, let's add background task processing, hungrier apps like Xcode, more simultaneous apps. I guess we'll need more memory and compute resources, and so therefore we'll need more battery, too.
So now I have a 2 lb iPad that doesn't have enough internal space to cool itself. Great. Thanks internet.
Let me start with this. My initial reaction from the first iPad still holds.
Why not touch macOS? There is just one answer: Profit. The business is not in solving user problems. It is to create a shiny toy with a limitation which you promise to solve in the near future. I moved away from iPad for drawing and just use it for a second screen on the go. For mobility, I have a smartphone.
It is getting ridiculous in an Apple camp. You introduce the last processor on a iPad? But iPad still is not a full laptop or desktop replacement?
Why?
I think of iPhones as personal devices, where each person may have their own. But iPads are more likely to be shared for personal use in families. The fact that each person using it cannot have their own user profiles, app data, etc., is a huge drawback. Apple has supported this for a long time (though probably not in the best way) for education, but it’s not available to others. Even tvOS supports switching between user profiles quickly.
Apple enforcing the idea that iPad (with iPadOS) should also be a personal device — one device per person — makes the user experience quite poor.