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Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

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Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#131
post #80

I wrote a 160,000 word book this year on an iPad Air with smart keyboard (I find how the pro keyboard doesn't fold all the way back to allow holding the iPad landscape too big of an annoyance to buy one). I think it's a brilliant device, and while limited, does do some things better than the Mac - annotating PDFs and ebooks with the Pencil being one of them. Also nice to hold a document one is working on in landscape…

Like all things Apple, iPad is great if you only use it for the exact, limited use cases it was designed for. The moment you start to be beyond that slightly it completely falls apart. Contrast it to a more general computer running macOS or Windows, which does a poorer job at what iPad does best, but it has a much longer tail where the complexity ramps up linearly, compared to the hockey stick of iOS.

> only use it for the exact, limited use cases it was designed for

Only if you stipulate that it was never designed to handle text editing, multi-object selection, and a number of other fundamental use cases that apparently no one at Apple bothers to do on their iPads — if they did, they’d either 1. Experiment to find better solutions; or 2. Admit that there is no good touch-based solution for this UX scenario.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#132

I really, really wish that Apple had not let developers opt-out their apps from running on M1/M2 Macbooks. My use case is a long flight where I want to watch a movie on a screen bigger than my phone. For a while, some of the streaming service iOS apps ran on my MBP. In fact, I subscribed to HBO Max partially because their app worked on my MBP. But since their rebrand to Max, it no longer works.

I was today years old when I heard you can put an iOS app on a Mac.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#133
post #80

I wrote a 160,000 word book this year on an iPad Air with smart keyboard (I find how the pro keyboard doesn't fold all the way back to allow holding the iPad landscape too big of an annoyance to buy one). I think it's a brilliant device, and while limited, does do some things better than the Mac - annotating PDFs and ebooks with the Pencil being one of them. Also nice to hold a document one is working on in landscape…

Same here, that was in 2018 and I was using the Editorial app. Great app for its time BTW. Although, once I got to the publishing part, I found it lacking and switched to my Windows(At the time) now I use PopOS. But that was before Obsidian. I discovered Obsidian on Hackernews BTW. Thanks guys. Obsidian was exactly what I needed as a drop it replacement for the power of the Editorial App on MacOS.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#136
post #6

When the iPad first came out, people knocked it as "a big iPod touch". But…maybe that wasn't a bad thing? I feel like the iPad, despite alllll the efforts to seemingly make it a pro device, is an iPhone, but bigger. It's great for messages, browsing Facebook, and watching video, and that's just fine. Because that serves a lot of people's needs, and trying to add in a bunch more stuff just overloads the touch interfac…

The ipad is the perfect device for old people. You can't mess it up, it's extremely simple to use, has a long life span, etc. The users do not care that they can not host a webserver on it because it prevents their bank account being drained after they click the wrong advert.

That hit close to home because my father’s bank account was indeed drained after clicking the wrong ad on an iPad. But it did require the intermediate step of my father having to call the number in the ad to talk to “bank security”.

Having fewer malware vectors is a big plus but one still needs to exercise caution.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#137
post #94
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they care nothing for what's better for you for productivity What is your perspective based on? I'm not sure it's accurate, especially for productivity/professionals [1]. This matches my personal experience. [1] https://www.jamf.com/blog/total-cost-of-ownership-mac-versus... edit: Any comments about the accuracy of this? Or perhaps something to dispute it?

Well if they were really for productivity they would have made all their software offerings over the last 20 years cross platform in order to allow users of other systems to feel such amazing productivity boosts. But they didnt, they walled it off and made mac's about as incompatible and hard to work with for any other device (android,windows,linux) as they possibly could. Proof in case, I can plug an android phone i…

> The most simple act of using a phone as a physical storage device to get something from point a to b....near impossible on apple hardware. Meanwhile its been stock standard functionality for about 15+ years on other devices.

It's been a long time since I stopped trying to like Android devices, but quite a few years ago I remember Android phones no longer working as a mass storage device you could drag files onto. That was a widely discussed intentional decision by Google and was one of several things that made me decide that Android's talk about freedom, openness and all that was just marketing. You can plug an Android in and drop stuff on it like a thumb drive again now?

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#138
post #80

I wrote a 160,000 word book this year on an iPad Air with smart keyboard (I find how the pro keyboard doesn't fold all the way back to allow holding the iPad landscape too big of an annoyance to buy one). I think it's a brilliant device, and while limited, does do some things better than the Mac - annotating PDFs and ebooks with the Pencil being one of them. Also nice to hold a document one is working on in landscape…

> I think I'm going to try laying out my next book using Affinity Publisher - I used the Mac version to lay out the last one so hope I can do the same while finding benefits for doing so with my little paddy.

Side note: I wonder if Adobe ever regrets discontinuing Framemaker for Mac given the resurgence of Apple in the intervening years.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#139
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to sell you two devices, and a monthly subscription to iCloud to interoperate between them.

What is this in reference to? I have an iPad and a MacBook. I don't pay a subscription. I usually use Microsoft OneDrive, so I can sync between/to my non apple devices, though I usually just use airdrop. Are you referring to extra cloud storage? edit: A response would be appreciated, so I can understand what's going on with this comment. This is a genuine question. What subscription am I missing out on here?

I haven't owned an Apple device in 10 years, but I think they're talking about iCloud.
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