Comment by everdrive
14 hours ago
An important lesson for anyone who believes it makes sense to use an iPad instead of a computer. (for any task)
14 hours ago
An important lesson for anyone who believes it makes sense to use an iPad instead of a computer. (for any task)
This is a myopic take.
I've found iPads to be fantastic presentation tools.
Having an ipad on a conference/convention booth is amazing - airplay my rotating content to a big screen, and when someone walks up I can grab the ipad to delve into details based on the conversation.
Early on (first gen ipad) I had a whole client team nickname me "the ipad guy" because I showed up and presented across a few ipad apps where I could pinch, zoom, and annotate live instead of showing a vanilla PPT file.
This might be the only use case in which a Windows tablet is a good option. I've seen some people using Windows tablets with a pen for presentations quite efficiently.
Windows has the benefit that it's still an open-ish OS. If something doesn't work as expected, it can be somehow hacked into the way you need it to be. I think Linux doesn't work well with touch devices and pen input, also the choice of presentation software is much more limited.
Which apps do you use for this? Keynote or something else?
Yes, Keynote is (was!) my go to. But it's been years since I've been presenter guy so I may end up with a vibe-presented custom solution if I did it today.
I've used and like https://github.com/nyblnet/bento, but more and more I'm just going to self-contained html because the effort in to get what I want is just so low.
Fully disagree. iPadOS is too unstable, janky, immature, and prone to awkward half-baked changes to be used as a regular computer. I've tried for years. OP is correct - stay far away from iPadOS for computing. Use macOS.
Yep.
iPadOS 27 broke many keyboard use cases for me, including very simple things like using tab to move to the next field on a form in Safari. It worked in iPadOS 26, but doesn’t now.
This adds to the bug where switching between apps with modifier keys tends to cause those modifiers to “stick”. That bug has been there for years, and prevents me from using my iPad as a programming environment even though the software support is there.
I should clarify: I have never attempted to replace by computer with an ipad. It wouldn't work for me.
Those who I have observed who have done so basically use the ipad for email and writing.
I was responding to "why would anyone use an ipad ever for anything?"
This seems to hold true for most people. One of my close friends (a successful founder) was an early adopter of the iPad Pro, and intended to make it his go-to device for traveling. He ended up buying the Magic Keyboard case, a USB-C dongle for HDMI out, and the Apple Pencil to comprise a proper Rube Goldberg travel experience.
After months of suffering through that, he switched back to a Macbook Air and carries the iPad for watching Plex now. I am still baffled as to which "pros" the iPad Pro is targeting.
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Well, the author needs it to be a tablet form factor with a stylus as described here https://teddysvoronos.com/2015-11-19-in-praise-of-goodnotes/
Both the hardware and software market for tablets running a real desktop OS still seem pretty terrible, and it's been over 10 years since the release of the first Apple Pencil. No competition seems to be coming at all. Windows Surface exists, but software is still not great and the stylus not as good as Apple's.
How good the stylus needs to be for presentation ?
I’m sure Apple could as easily break presentation mode on macOS.
They kinda already did for niche use-cases. When they introduced the orange/green activity indicators for camera or microphone, they broke some workflows for VJing as your stage visuals now got a persistent dot in the top-right.
But it'd be far easier for me to fix it, even if I had to disable SyStEm iNtEgRiTy PrOtEcTiOn to do it.
In my humble opinion it’s best to prepare yourself for that to stop being possible, if you intend to stay on MacOS. We both know which way the wind is blowing on that, with the sealed System volume, etc. etc.
(I’m not happy about that - I used to love modifying the system in unapproved ways on Windows and Mac.)
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A lot of teachers at my uni use them for drawing on the slides during lecture
Why? It would be helpful to understand why you support such a silly statement.
Why not play it even safer with an overhead projector?
With an unreliable bulb? Please. Poster board is where it's at.
What’s a computer?
I served on a jury recently. The lawyers used an iPad with special trial software to present evidence.
It worked fine. They won their judgment, the lawyers with the desktop PC setup lost the case.
I rented a car from Enterprise recently. They use iPads for everything since you are walking out to the cars. This is a giant company doing most of their business logic on iPads.
In my mind the “iPad isn’t a real computer” crowd are doing a sort of pearl clutching. Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
I think the real "ipad isn't a real computer" thing is that you can do arbitrary stuff with the computer. I can have arbitrary programs open. I can write arbitrary programs. I can arrange them arbitrarily. I can open dozens of them and keep them open in memory. I can push my device to the limits of its resources if I want and it won't try and offload anything stupidly on me, it will do what I ask of it.
But you could always make an app to handle car rentals for ipad or iphone or whatever. You could make an app for lawyers doing documents. That was never the argument against "ipad isn't a computer." It doesn't expose the file system to you. More than anything, it tries to keep up the curtain between you, Dorothy, and the wizard, who is just a man after all. That is why it is not a real computer and will never be one fundamentally.
I will have you recall that the root comment of this thread is claiming that the iPad is not suitable for any task which is really more of the attitude I’m pushing back against. I find that kind of philosophy to be a form of snobby techno-elitism. The vibe is ”Only simpleton rubes use an iPad, which isn’t a real computer.”
The problem is that the line of being “real” or not is defined in the eyes of the beholder. Is a computer a real computer if it lets me rm -rf / or is that just stupid system design? Is a computer not a real computer if you can’t move the menu bar or taskbar or are the designers of the computer allowed to have a strong opinions on such topics? Everyone will draw those lines in different places.
We could use this same philosophy to claim that a laptop isn’t a real computer because it doesn’t let me add expansion cards, doesn’t have GPIO pins, etc. All those lines in the sand are in the eye of the beholder.
In your eyes, a computer that doesn’t let you write and execute arbitrary code on the device is not a real computer, but to the vast majority of people on this planet have no ability or desire to write code ever on any device, so for them that distinction is completely irrelevant. That would be like if my garbage man told me that my Toyota Tundra isn’t a real truck because it can’t compact garbage.
Perhaps "real computer" means being able to perform general purpose tasks. I don't think iPads are capable of that with how locked down they are.
I do believe them to be computers that excel in specialized settings. Like in your two examples.
I had to use an iPad with the Magic Keyboard as a laptop replacement for a week, since my only laptop (MacBook) was in repair for that time.
I really, really, really missed having an actual laptop. I lost the ability to:
* Listen to music while watching a video (iPadOS does not allow multiple audio sources at once; playing a YouTube video while playing a song on Apple Music wasn't allowed)
* Quickly edit photos (I had 400 GB+ photos to cull/cut down; Lightroom for iPad required me to transfer photos to internal storage before culling to upload to cloud storage first, and I didn't have enough room; and specialized software for culling on the iPad equivalent to FastRawViewer that may or may not have worked all had a subscription fee)
* Easily search for files (Files search was far slower and unreliable, especially with files split between OneDrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive), and manage files in general
* Edit videos with the features I needed (Premiere Pro lacked features on iPad and other video editor alternatives had no iPad equivalents), or simply easily edit videos due to friction in file management
* Use video-recording software like OBS to record a presentation
* Use all features of flashcard software named Anki; I could not export individual decks or use other features (desktop-only feature; the iOS and browser versions did not have this)
* Easily manage and resize having multiple windows on the screen at once (a two-second window arrangement took 10+ seconds, with constant hold-and-dragging and precise dragging at specific changing corners required)
* Quickly and easily extract text from images for translation elsewhere (which added difficulties for language learning)
* Run certain internet browser extensions
* Compile and edit source code for software
And so on. I'll grant that many users won't need many of these features. But at the very least, the ability to find files and manage windows is essential, yet it's still so cumbersome with iPads versus laptops years after the first iPadOS release.
I fundamentally think that computers should work for you, and you shouldn't need to change your habits and workflow due to OS limitations (losing the ability to simply listen to music while watching a video was the biggest one for me). Yet I ran into so many walls with the iPad.
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I don’t think the examples I gave were particularly specialized.
Enterprise is running what I assume to be a web-based CRUD application and the trial attorneys were displaying PDFs and other documents on a projector.
Besides code compilation I can’t really think of anything an iPad can’t do. Can you list out some examples?
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Desktop Windows computers at a large corp are usually also really locked down by IT, and are incapable of being able to perform general purpose tasks.
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> Has your “real” computer never had a bug or regresssion?
Sure, but the question is how limited you are in what you can do about it. iDevices are incredibly locked down. On my laptop I would just use the package manager to downgrade a package until it is fixed, or restore a backup. Or you could just fix the code yourself (or ask an AI for help to do so these days).
Even Windows has system restore to roll back to a previous OS version iirc (though it has been many years since I used windows last, going to all Linux has been so good). Not sure if that is possible on an iPad? I know Android doesn't really let you downgrade either the OS or an individual app, I would assume it is similar on iOS.
The ability to downgrade a package on a desktop OS is not universal.
You can’t do it if the application is a web application.
You can’t do it if the vendor doesn’t provide the old version and you didn’t save a copy.
You can’t do it if there’s a security issue that required the update in the first place.
You can’t do it if you consume the app via the Microsoft store or Mac App Store.
You can’t do it if the application automatically manages its version.
Windows is probably the only OS that even gives you a realistic OS downgrade option that a non-technical user could utilize. On macOS you’re looking at a full disk wipe to downgrade. On Linux, well, let’s just say I don’t think the small law firm that won the trial I served on is going to be able to operate Linux in the first place.
Fix the code yourself, again I don’t think a small law firm is going to do that. Even if they were going to it wouldn’t be worth their hourly rate to try. They depend on their software vendors to fix issues.
In a corporate environment, a company like Enterprise can tightly test and control what versions of iPadOS and their own in-house apps run on their iPads. In that respect it’s just like a regular computer.
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It’s not even that to me, it’s bigger than that. On a real computer, if you don’t like what application is showing on Monitor 2, you can just drag a different program onto Monitor 2.
iOS in contrast, follows the modern way of designing devices: nothing is customizable besides mild “theming.” The entire interface (and every behavior) springs fully formed from the mind of an inexperienced “uX dEsIgNeR” and is a fixed, immutable object whose specifics are not available to be adjusted.
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Apple only lets you downgrade to iOS versions that are still signed. Typically previous updates remain signed for ~1 month. You can check which updates are still signed here: https://appledb.dev/
However, you can downgrade to any previous iOS version if a bootrom exploit is found for your device.
For example you can use https://github.com/pwnerblu/surrealra1n to downgrade A12/A13 chip devices using this bootrom exploit: https://github.com/ahmadkamal09999-tech/usbliter8
Generally agree here. iPads have been this weird category of devices that have desktop class hardware, but the software is intentionally restricted. I posit Apple is confused about what to do with the iPad. It is the best selling tablet brand, but that doesn't mean much when you look at the absolute garbage the rest of the industry is putting out.
Anyway, a productive conversation this specific problem would be to borrow the solution from the Mac screen sharing UX. Pick which window(s) you want displayed on an external display. All other windows will only appear on the primary iPad screen. This is not a hard problem to solve.
> It is the best selling tablet brand, but that doesn't mean much when you look at the absolute garbage the rest of the industry is putting out.
That’s where I am.
I love my iPad, because I love the tablet form factor. I used an Android tablet for years prior to the iPad Pro releasing, and iPadOS is much better. I’ve played with Android tablets periodically since but they don’t seem to care about the form factor at all.
Just because it’s the best doesn’t mean it’s good, though. I don’t understand how they can justify selling a $300+ keyboard for a $1,700 device and never fix long-standing bugs with keyboard use, much less continue to add regressions in new releases that aren’t fixed.
I mean, the real lesson is to not trust Apple. I can do the very basic things the OP article is describing on my phone, let alone a tablet.
This is a completely absurd take. The entire point of TFA is that it used to work fantastically well until iOS 27 broke it.
It's not clear if the way it worked before was the way Apple intended or not. Usually the app in the foreground controls displays, which wasn't a problem on iPads until the definition of foreground changed. It could be that an app was /supposed/ to let go of external displays when leaving foreground, and not it's just enforced. Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
> Unfortunately, Apple gets to decide what is the correct behavior, not the user.
Apple used to put a lot of money into user experience to get the behavior correct for the users. Presentations are an important niche that that group wouldn't have ignored. What is correct presentations is probably wrong for everything else - but you still need to make that group work correctly since it is important.
I'm not sure what happened to user experience groups everywhere. They seem to have lost and the world is worse for it. Though at least they did set some good patterns that remain to this day - but only because the people in charge haven't changed it.
Good luck convincing anyone outside of HN types. I get regular requests from my wifeto assist with some task and my answer is “you can’t really do that on a phone or tablet, you need to use a real computer”. They are still not done.
It sounds like she’s asking you for help and you’re suggesting using a different tool rather than helping. If you keep repeating that it means she either doesn’t want to or has trouble doing it. Just take care of the tasks dude lol
Okay, clean a 16000 email backlog on a phone.
On her phone.
Without her computer logged into her email.
Without her phone.
"I can do this for you, but I will need to use your computer to do it, and I will need you to read me off a bunch of 2FA codes in all likelihood, so you can either give me your phone or you can sit next to me while I do it. Oh, and they're your emails, so you may as well pull up a chair or I'm just going to have to guess whether you care or not."
My time is valuable too. You want me to do it, you help.
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How is he able to help more other than telling the truth that phones and tablets can't do what she needs?
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Sometimes, "use a different tool" is in fact the correct and most helpful answer. If someone comes to me asking why they are having such a hard time pounding in nails, and I see they are using the handle of their screwdriver, I'm not going to give them tips on how to hold the screwdriver better, I'm going to say "dude use a hammer, you'll be much better off".