When is the FAA going to let me use my laptop during takeoff and landing - that’s the biggest thing ipad has going for it, that’s an hour+ of unproductive time.
Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
211–220 of 630 posts
Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
#212The key sentence here is: > This is the fundamental difference between the Mac (a platform that basically lets developers and users do anything they want) and the iPad (where if Apple doesn’t specifically allow it, it can’t be done). Apple (since Lisa/Mac, after Apple II, which had an open architecture) likes appliances and to control the user experience, so the iPad is "more Apple" than Macs are. Whenever I am waiti…
It's simple.
A laptop is a keyboard-oriented device, packing a,lot of computing power. It has the shortest battery life, and requires a desk, or at least a seat, to operate comfortably.
A phone is a handheld device, one which is always on you. It necessarily has a smaller screen, no separate keyboard, and only has a decent battery life because it sleeps most of the time. It can have serious peak performance, but has a hard time sustaining it (ask Ingress players).
An iPad (or another tablet if you feel fancy) is a two-hands device with a good, easy to use touchscreen, and software built around it. It's a natural choice for a graphic artist, for instance. An iPad has a more tolerable onscreen keyboard than a phone. Also its screen is large enough to enjoy movies, etc, so it's a convenient visual media consumption device, more so than a phone. I had laptops with touchscreens; they were fun, but not nearly as handy.
(For the record: I travel with a phone and a Linux laptop.)
Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
#213The key sentence here is: > This is the fundamental difference between the Mac (a platform that basically lets developers and users do anything they want) and the iPad (where if Apple doesn’t specifically allow it, it can’t be done). Apple (since Lisa/Mac, after Apple II, which had an open architecture) likes appliances and to control the user experience, so the iPad is "more Apple" than Macs are. Whenever I am waiti…
You'd think depending on the person, they'd travel with
EITHER their phone OR their iPad OR their laptop
- The iPad works as a second monitor for a Mac laptop. Great for creative/tech people.
- If people are traveling for work, they are bringing their work laptop which may have corporate lockdown/spyware software installed. Therefore using their work laptop for entertainment might not be possible or optimal. (Not to be crass, but: watching porn in a hotel room is a pretty common use case)
I'd prefer to travel lighter (and I do when possible) but I don't find iPad+Macbook to be an onerous load for a airplane carry-on bag. Although, a smaller person or somebody with an injury or disability might feel differently.
At least - thanks to the EU - soon they can all share the same USB-C charger.
Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Screen Mirroring is possible, but it has to be a little creative. iPad is super handy but I'm not sure a laptop has turn by turn nav, maybe it could via an emulator.
> maybe it could via an emulator As a programmer with serious mobile experience I fully understand it. But it sound a bit crazy that a powerful and more superior (and open! In both hard and sometimes soft - if with an opensource OS) platform need so _emulate_ an embedded one (mobile, usually at least partially proprietary one) to provide turn-by-turn nav: what appears to be a first-order need of anyone in the modern…
Navigation from Google us not free.
You can run OSM in navigation mode, I suppose.
Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
#215I 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.
Unlike most everything else Apple, the degree to which iPads seem to dominate the tablet market is interesting. In general tablets never really caught on, but to the extent that people want tablets, they apparently actually want exactly the use case Apple envisioned.
Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parent's point still stands as in a decent ecosystem you'd get down to at most two. For instance a phone and a Surface Pro covers 100% of the use cases, there's no gap for a 3rd device. For some this gets down to one device with a Galaxy Fold and DEX. People might have different preferences and/or be locked in the Apple ecosystem anyway, but we have working products showing things done differently ("think different"…
The iPad is a much better tablet than the Surface. The art and note apps are incomparably better. The ebook reader apps too. iPad OS is limited, but it's fine for reading, writing and sketching. It's good to do that on a separate device that is not connected to work stuff. I can bring my iPad in the bedroom because it's just a fancy book. Windows is also far too needy for this sort of device. I returned my Surface af…
It comes down what you actually want to do. My time spent on the iPad was defined by what I couldn't do, and it was extremely frustrating, I ended up not doing it instead of go getting the laptop from across the house.
Windows is not refined nor optimized for tablet use by any measure, but it actually does the job, instead of showing a cute and extremely refined middle finger half the time.
The breaking point for me was the reader apps, where I'd have a file and just no way to read it, short of taking 10 min on a desktop to somewhat convert it to what the iPad can handle (see below). Since they're also in a pissing match with Amazon, the reading experience is just subpar. What's the point of a simple and elegant interface if I'm still babysitting what's going in there and have to constantly think about work-arounds that also end up clunky and broken ?
> Art and note apps
Adobe suite, ClipStudio etc. are all there, in their actual, professional, full-blown version, and not some compromised "on the go" version. Same for One-note, obsidian etc., there's no lack of them on Windows while it was a fresh market on the iPad.
> ebook reader apps
I think iBooks is the only reader you don't get (is there a web version ? I have no idea).
Granted I buy most of my books on kindle, the in-browser reader works well enough (in the end, I'm full screen turning pages, so makes no difference). I'd argue getting the read the book straight from the page I bought them is pretty great.
I didn't bother with the android subsystem version but it would be an option if there is any limitation on the web part. I also have a bunch of old ebooks and scans from way before there were stores, and of course they were better handled by the windows apps (at some point I was using CloudReader on iOS, and it just disappeared).
Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As a person that always had, and still has, PCs, and also now has MacBooks, I'm suspecting that I use my devices in a significantly different way than you do. > made all their software offerings over the last 20 What Apple software would people want outside of the Apple ecosystem? Do you have an example? Most of the "niceness" is system wide/cross device integration related, many of which don't have an equivalent in…
> For example, try to wirelessly transfer a file, quickly, between any combination of linux and Windows without an active WiFi connection.
bah gawd that’s IrDA’s music!
Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parent's point still stands as in a decent ecosystem you'd get down to at most two. For instance a phone and a Surface Pro covers 100% of the use cases, there's no gap for a 3rd device. For some this gets down to one device with a Galaxy Fold and DEX. People might have different preferences and/or be locked in the Apple ecosystem anyway, but we have working products showing things done differently ("think different"…
The iPad is a much better tablet than the Surface. The art and note apps are incomparably better. The ebook reader apps too. iPad OS is limited, but it's fine for reading, writing and sketching. It's good to do that on a separate device that is not connected to work stuff. I can bring my iPad in the bedroom because it's just a fancy book. Windows is also far too needy for this sort of device. I returned my Surface af…
That's just software, though. In a decent ecosystem you would be able to run any software you want on any device you want.
Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
#219That’s why I like my Surface Go 2: it lets me carry a real OS in a tiny tablet form factor. I take it everywhere and it has been my only travel laptop for a couple of years. I have even done local Rust development while on flights. If only it wasn’t so frigging slow… it’d be awesome.
Yeah I recently bought an iPad because the surface is either too slow to be usable or like double the price or an iPad
I just wanted a tablet with good software, and the surface is so close to being that but the Go is a disgrace. Even an instore Go 3 barely handles opening Edge. Edge!
Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
#220I've been trying to use iPad as a developer tool for over 10 years now and it seems I'm starting to get it right. I have tried a lot of software since the creation of the iPhone 2G, connected hardware, joysticks, keyboards, mice, connected an iPad to a computer back in 2015. I think the iPad is the most successful device for smart people, but the problem is marketing. Apple had the ability to make a single system for all devices from the very beginning, but the market and maximum profit was more important.
I developed the system and development tools. And with the help of which I created an application for HN on the iPad.
Here is a demo video: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/833395245
I'm building a community, join to Discord https://discord.gg/4m9g7KSaMV