Comment by paultopia
2 days ago
Hard disagree. The iPad is a fantastic mac replacement for many purposes. I use the iPad Pro w/ the “magic keyboard” case for working essentially whenever I’m not physically in home or office in similar ways that I do my Mac, for two really big reasons:
(1) The (11-inch) size is fantastic: you get enough screen real estate to see what you’re reading and writing, but it still fits into an arbitrarily small bag and is light enough that you can comfortably walk around all day with it. The death of the original tiny MacBook Air was a huge fail for apple
(2) CELLULAR CONNECTIVITY FOR GOD’S SAKE CELLULAR CONNECTIVITY. Yes, you can always hotspot your phone, however, that’s still not nearly so reliable as a device with its own connectivity, some providers still limit bandwidth there, plus the last thing I need is extra battery drain on my phone when I’m already stressed about it.
TBF, if Apple ever brought back the original MacBook Air with modern specs and with a cellular chip, I would just take gigantic buckets full of money and throw them in the general direction of Cupertino until I got one, like, instantly. And there are definitely still compromises—-as an academic, I’ve been meaning to just write a command line front end to zotero and fling it onto a digital ocean server or something, because its iPad app is so godawful. But on the whole, I still reach for my iPad much much much more than my MacBook, for those two killer features.
I finally found someone who uses the cellular feature in laptops! I always wondered who the hell that was for, now I know at least one person.
I don't use it (or need it) myself, but when I was working for a sporting equipment manufacturer a number of years ago, every salesman had a cellular dongle for their laptop. We had to remind them they had direct ethernet connections when they were in the office.
Fun fact, I once bought a reconditionned laptop and the sim card of the previous owner was still on the slot. More interestingly I could use it to connect to the mobile network for at least 2 years without even knowing the PIN (and having reinstalled to linux).
Do people really not use it? I use my iPad cellular all the time. Constantly.
One of these days I'm going to buy one of those old MS Surfaces with cellular and stick Linux on it. But for the installation/drivers hassles I'd have already done so.
It really depends how frequently one is outside. I have had many laptops with cell chips and sim slot but never bothered to pay for a sim when I could just tether my smartphone connection, even when using the train. I usually plug the phone to the laptop if I need to charge the phone.