Apple has come around to basically just outright copy the Microsoft Surface. It does look very nice though.
I was pretty skeptical of the Surface myself but man I see them everywhere. At least a heck of a lot more often than I anticipated.
New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
261–270 of 668 posts
Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
#262The front facing camera is seriously neglected. They keep on adding more powerful/fancy cameras to the rear that people likely under-use in the common case, while the front camera that is commonly used for work, video conferencing, selfies, etc remains on the wrong edge and is under-powered. It is almost farcical with the new keyboard setting the top to the non-camera edge. The front facing camera should be the premi…
They only need it to be optimized for close range in most use cases. I wouldn’t say is neglected
Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
#263The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro will be available for purchase in May for $299 (US) for the 11-inch iPad Pro and $349 (US) for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro Wow. This must be one hell of a keyboard..
What does Apple have against the Escape key? That's a deal-breaker right there.
Completely off-topic, but for everybody that maps Caps Lock to esc, how do you ctrl-tab? That's what my Caps Lock is mapped to, and I cannot understand how ctrl-tab can be any sort of comfortable to reach on a standard layout?
Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
#264So basically it has evolved into a laptop with a detachable monitor that includes a built-in camera (which is for sure awesome)
Yes I wonder what's going to 'win', tablet or 'laptop which can act like tablet', or will they both stay? At this rate we'll have to start comparing tablets like this to laptops like Surface Pro and it's clones (or vice-versa, maybe the Surface is the clone, don't remember exact sequence of events) because the only difference is the OS. And if more 'tablet modes' start emerging from main OS the gap will become very n…
Once I got my ipad pro I basically stopped using my laptop for anything but programming and video games. The former is basically just waiting on tooling and the latter is only a problem because the specific games I want to play aren't available.
I think the iPad will be the long term winner here. Legacy OS's are just way too reliant on keyboard / mouse. Having owned a Surface Book, I can easily say that the tablet mode is not workable with the software ecosystem that exists. You can mostly make it function in limited cases, but outside of a small handful of programs built specifically for it the experience is poor.
On the other hand, the addition of a keyboard just makes the iPad even easier to use. Using a mouse is slightly more awkward since you can't use gestures, but you can always fall back to the screen that's right in front of you. The extra precision is overkill, but it isn't painful.
Another layer to add in the tablets' favor: kids these days are growing up using phones and tablets. That's the way they interact with computing technology. It will be increasingly easier to convince these new generations to buy something that's familiar, but with some extra power and utility, as apposed to something that is foreign.
Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
#265The front facing camera is seriously neglected. They keep on adding more powerful/fancy cameras to the rear that people likely under-use in the common case, while the front camera that is commonly used for work, video conferencing, selfies, etc remains on the wrong edge and is under-powered. It is almost farcical with the new keyboard setting the top to the non-camera edge. The front facing camera should be the premi…
I agree. The software needs support for this too. I earnestly tried to use the iPad for a few weeks, and the placement of the camera was annoying (off center, angled up, no one looks good at this angle). But the software was the deal breaker. iOS and iPadOS disallow background camera use and there is no API to allow it except for FaceTime which does PiP in the corner when it’s backgrounded. Even side-by-side in the new iPadOS will disable the camera when you switch the input cursor to other app! Makes it impossible to review or take notes during video calls or look at reference materials.
Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
#266The front facing camera is seriously neglected. They keep on adding more powerful/fancy cameras to the rear that people likely under-use in the common case, while the front camera that is commonly used for work, video conferencing, selfies, etc remains on the wrong edge and is under-powered. It is almost farcical with the new keyboard setting the top to the non-camera edge. The front facing camera should be the premi…
I agree. The software needs support for this too. I earnestly tried to use the iPad for a few weeks, and the placement of the camera was annoying (off center, angled up, no one looks good at this angle). But the software was the deal breaker. iOS and iPadOS disallow background camera use and there is no API to allow it except for FaceTime which does PiP in the corner when it’s backgrounded. Even side-by-side in the n…
This ^
I wish there was a way to take notes on my iPad and join the call from my iPad. This it the main thing that keeps me from making the leap 100%.
Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
#267The front facing camera is seriously neglected. They keep on adding more powerful/fancy cameras to the rear that people likely under-use in the common case, while the front camera that is commonly used for work, video conferencing, selfies, etc remains on the wrong edge and is under-powered. It is almost farcical with the new keyboard setting the top to the non-camera edge. The front facing camera should be the premi…
I think you are misjudging the "common case".
The front camera is 7MP (close to 4K) and records 1080p. I don't know of any videoconferencing software that uses more than 1080p, and there's always massive compression applied anyways which would defeat image improvements. The quality is more than enough.
There's also very little practical issue with it being on the side when in landscape mode. It just means that your eyes appear to be looking sideways rather than downwards (arguably an improvement, as eyelids don't move down -- much closer to how people actually look in an in-person meeting when not looking directly at you) and that your head is about 10% off-center. So a non-issue. I've never seen anybody even notice it in a conference call, much less complain.
Finally who is taking selfies with their iPad? That's what phones are for. It's too big to hold with one hand.
The common use case for cameras in the iPad Pro is actually the rear camera. iPads are being increasingly used as professional tools in shooting production-quality video as well as all sorts of other commercial applications.
So I think the balance is quite right.
Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
#268Love my 2018 iPad Pro, use it everyday for school work and for personal things. Hope to see more options for development on the iPad in the near future (requires Apple to open up developer options).
There are some cool apps that I think you guys would like. They don't have a lot of marketing behind them.. Carnets (offline Jupyter notebook) [free] and a-Shell (interactive terminal) [free].
Took some digging, but note that the new trackpad keyboard is compatible with the 2018 released iPad Pro models. Looks like the keys are bigger, resembling their laptop keyboard a bit more. I really enjoy typing on my smart folio so I hope the experience will be similar!
Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. But it’s interesting when two things evolve towards each other, but starting from different places. Like comparing bats and birds, or penguins, otters, and fish. In this case, evolving from a device designed for touch only into touch-first is going to be different from a device that evolved from—let’s be honest—keyboards, punch cards, and the command-line.
Judging from the (in my opinion) really clunky multi window feature in iPadOS it seems they are struggling to get even close to the usability of macOS. I don’t think so far iPadOS scales well to larger screen sizes and multitasking. A lot of things take more clicking compared to macOS.
It's ironic, but I've transitioned from using Ulysses and other apps for text editing to Blink + Mosh +
Tmux + Neovim (with Goyo plugin for focusing). This is on a 12.9" iPad Pro.
It's a smooth setup. I like iOS, but am tired of dragging apps from the dock.
(Note: I use Working Copy as a local git client & editor for times when I'm without internet or when I need to copy to another app. Great combo.)
Re: New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a device that doesn't support other browser rendering engines or even toy compilers, long way to go before something like VSCode could be possible, a product that let's you trivially slipstream in any renderer/script engine/compiler you want at a single click. Plus would it really be an "iPad" with you sacrifice the whole security model to allow debugging?
> Plus would it really be an "iPad" with you sacrifice the whole security model to allow debugging? The security model being that you need to be attached to a Mac to allow debugging? Other than that I'm totally with you. The ipad is far away from being a frictionless, general computation device.
The security model being that debugging requires the user to take significant steps, and isn't something apps can just do silently, yes.