[gyomu]

Touchscreens suck for text manipulation. The keyboard and the mouse are the superior input devices for wrangling characters and words and lines and paragraphs.

The author wants using the iPad to “feel like a finger ballet, your hands swooping and swiping”, but also the author seems to care a lot about emails and Claude Code and writing. Those are fundamentally at odds, and it makes complete sense that they’re very happy with a MacBook Neo instead (but they could have just been using a MacBook Air the whole time).

The iPad is fantastic for, as the author points out, “reading the news and watching YouTube and playing games”, and it’s an amazing tool for digital artists and anyone who does lots of hand annotation work. So really overall a product that’s found its niche, and when I see grandpas and grandmas and students at my local cafe using their iPad their hands are effectively swooping and swiping in a finger ballet.

I think there’s just a kind of techie who desperately wishes they could do everything on an iPad, but really the machine meant for them is a lightweight MacBook (Neo or Air), and for some reason that induces some sort of frustration in them and they feel like things somehow shouldn’t be that way. I guess I get it, the iPad hardware is pretty slick. But yeah, your work makes you a MacBook person, not an iPad person, that’s just how it is. (Apple should make an 11” MacBook again though).

> iPad apps should be weird as hell, unlike anything you find on a desktop operating system […] The iPad should be a highly-focused touch playground. Weird as hell, one-of-a-kind apps

I don’t know what this obsession with “weird apps” is, but 99.9% of people don’t care about “weird apps” and so that’s not enough to justify a whole device category (and you can find weird apps on all platforms anyways).

[MDTHLN]

> The iPad is fantastic for, as the author points out, “reading the news and watching YouTube and playing games”

> I think there’s just a kind of techie who desperately wishes they could do everything on an iPad, but really the machine meant for them is a lightweight MacBook (Neo or Air)

Couldn't agree more. I am that person. I spent months deliberating before buying an 11" iPad (with keyboard). Used it for a week for the novelty. But the keyboard, trackpad, and multi-tasking is so janky compared to my Mac that it's sat in a cupboard ever since.

The MacBook Air is so quick and light that it's always just as convenient to get the MacBook out instead.

And that's not even for 'techie' tasks. Basic note-taking, researching, and simple spreadsheets are all easier on the Mac. The only time I reach for the iPad is if I want to watch a video and my girlfriend is already using the TV.

That being said, the iPad mini is a perfect companion if you do want an iPad but already have a decent MacBook. Such a great form-factor and doesn't pretend to be a laptop replacement.

[bombcar]

I’ve tried three or four times over the decades to make an iPad “work” and have never found anything to “do” with it that doesn’t quickly get subsumed by my phone (more easily available) or my laptop (better typing etc).

It always ends up playing videos or the kids playing some silly game.

[socalgal2]

Mine never got used and I've bought 4 of them (I'm an idiot). First time they were relatively new. 2nd time I got a Pro thinking the pencil would make me use it for drawing. 3rd time was to read comics. Latest time was someone recommending to put on a treadmill at the gym for a movie.

In all cases, I used them 2-3 times and then never touched them again. Obviously some people love them. My mom loves and uses hers. I edit text too much and the select, copy and paste on touch screens is attrocious even today.

[coldtea]

Depends on what you do.

For things like drawing (Procreate and co), editing images and even videos on the go, using it with a MIDI keyboard and AU plugins for gigs, reading ebooks, watching a movie in bed, etc its way better than both the Mac and the iPhone.

Paired with a BT keyboard, for niche stuff like focus writing apps (closer to fancy typewriter with no distractions than a full laptop or phone) it's also great.

[trueno]

i got an ipad mini cause i thought the pencil was cool. it's neat, tablets are always over idealized i think. had big dreams of using it to note take in meetings lol good joke my adhd cursed self will never reread a note.

so it's mostly a desk weight now. besides pencil input, there isn't anything i'd do on it that i wouldn't prefer doing on my laptop. i absolutely can't stand typing on ipads.

[us-merul]

The difference for me has been the Apple Pencil. Now I don’t view the iPad as trying to replicate the mouse and keyboard experience, because it’s something different. For notes, brainstorming, research ideas—something where I don’t want a keyboard—the iPad with Pencil has been excellent.

[benoau]

> I think there’s just a kind of techie who desperately wishes they could do everything on an iPad

I think if the hardware differences really mattered Sidecar wouldn't exist, Mac wouldn't run iOS apps, iPhone wouldn't stream to Mac, and the AVP wouldn't stream/run apps from both platforms.

Would those devices be better if their software was strictly siloed from each other?

[troupo]

> Would those devices be better if their software was strictly siloed from each other?

Yes, yes they would. You would get software actually designed to fully exploit the capabilities of the device. And not, for example, shitty lazy port of mobile apps to MacOS

[benoau]

> You would get software actually designed to fully exploit the capabilities of the device.

Or you would just have a void where that hypothetical software could be, and this is what actually happened to the iPad (and AVP).

[troupo]

iPad could run iOS software since forever. Did it help iPad?

[benoau]

Compared to having even less software? Yes.

Compared to a hypothetical scenario where developers care to build iPad apps? No.

I don't think the availability of iPhone apps on iPad is what derailed development of iPad apps either, practically all the ROI building software for Apple hardware comes from impulse spending on the iPhone and even with 500+ million iPads in circulation today it doesn't come close.

[troupo]

iPad was sabotaged by Apple themselves, as they never figured out how to position it, and what capabilities to give it.

Multi-tasking? Half-assed. Keyboard and mouse support? Half-assed. OS capabilities beyond iOS on a laptop-like device? Non-existent. This was additionally hamstrung by "just check a checkbox, and a half-assed port of your app will run on iPad".

We've now seen the same play out with MacOS: why bother creating an actual app when you can just run a mobile app? Even Apple's first-party apps do this now.

[DrScientist]

>Touchscreens suck for text manipulation.

Indeed - and given LLM's have made the 'command line' great again and voice isn't appropriate in every scenario ( far too public ), hard to see how text input isn't critical.

[Kichererbsen]

I totally agree. I had to choose and chose a macbook air. Love that little machine! Then, when I had saved up enough, I got myself the ipad (13") for reading ttrpg pdfs.

The two machines solve totally different problems. I never bothered to get the keyboard for the ipad - because typing is something i do on the macbook air. The ipad is incredible for reading pdfs that are meant to be letter/a4 sized.

[zozbot234]

> Touchscreens suck for text manipulation.

Works fine with gestural input a.k.a. the old Graffiti format, originally from Palm.

[dredmorbius]

That worked with a stylus rather than fingertip input.

The stylus has a finer point-resolution than a finger, making for more effective touch actions.

I do miss my old PalmOS devices....

[zozbot234]

Plenty of tablets and touchscreens support stylus input though, including Apple Pencil.

[dredmorbius]

That wasn't my point.

Graffiti is not possible without a stylus, or at the very least is vastly less effective.

Android and iOS are both "finger first" interfaces. You can use a stylus, but you don't have to. And everything is designed around finger-fatness. Icons, gestures, on-screen keyboard.

[skydhash]

I much prefer the stylus. You only need to see artist that paint and do sculpting with Wacom displays to see that this has a much better potential than finger-based touch. The latter is ok for light consumption, but for not so much for productivity.

[dredmorbius]

Stylus for pointing. Hard keyboard for serious text input, though Graffiti isn't bad, and is significantly preferable to a soft keyboard.

Finger input is more convenient, for very casual use. Stylus suffers from both loss of the stylus itself (particularly when these are integrated into storage on the device itself), and inconsistent sizing of styli, even by the same manufacturer and nominal device model and version.

For the latter, Motorola's Stylus Android phones retain the same model and version number while the stylus dimensions change sufficiently to make them incompatible. This may induce a certain level of frustration....

[taude]

100%, bringback the macbook air, but in a new form factor.