411–420 of 630 posts
Get a Lenovo yoga 7i for $500 (iPad price) and you have a fully capable multi Linux machine (via WSL) which is also a fully featured touchscreen tablet. Uses the same little USB charger as your phone.
The 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…
Pretty incidental comment, but just had to bite- "At least - thanks to the EU - soon they can all share the same USB-C charger." The EU is basically the guy that at 5am declares that the sun must soon rise or else . By the time the EU decided on their USB-C dictum, Apple -- a co-inventor and standards participant of USB-C -- had switched their laptops fully to USB-C, their desktops to USB-C, and half their pad line t…
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At the time of my first daughter's birth, my local government gifted me an ipad mini. Three use cases: 1. I find it extremely useful for one specific thing: chess. I can't effectively play blitz timed games with a mouse, and with a smartphone I get way more off-by-one mistaken taps than with the ipad mini. 2. Almost five years later, my daughter enjoys making animations on it with Scratch Jr. 3. It is a comfy form fa…
Have you tried Kindle (or other e-reader) instead of iPad? Works very well for me.
Have you tried reading content on the web on the kindle, as the ones I mention above?
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The problem is an organizational cultural problem at Apple itself: they are control freaks obsessed with putting the user first, but as with all extremists they take it too far, trying to obtain some “perfect” user experience, even when that hurts the user’s own interests! Apple sees developers and third party software as threats to the user, the only safe thing to do is to lock it all down. Apple also got addicted t…
Those are all the main reasons I don't choose Apple devices.
I admire the sheer time and resources poured in perfecting the Apple experience, it has been its trademark since original ipods. But the way they set up relation between customer and provider is so unequal and outright disrespectful, I'll never buy their product.
Don't treat me like an incompetent idiot and we can start talking.
Unfortunately though, as of today, we're really no closer. For some insane reason, most computers that can do mobile broadband cannot do calling or SMS, at least not in any obvious way. The PinePhone Pro offers a potential story, giving you effectively Linux but on a touchscreen, but many of the OS options for it do not handle suspend well enough; and the RK3399S is not exactly about to blow anybody's mind with its performance. And of course, with no keyboard, you'll need to dock it to do any kind of "productivity" work.
With how fast flagship phones are, dockable smartphones that can just provide a full desktop OS experience when plugged in should be commonplace, but they're not. Some vendors have shown off different compelling ideas, but nothing is quite fully baked.
As for the iPad... It's still kind of a toy. I like it for drawing, the Apple Pencil is nice, but I struggle strongly to put it in the same class as a general purpose computer.
Also, one last note. I really regret the iPhone. It was a really important device, because it showed off how to design a mobile device with a capacitive touch screen that was actually nice to use. But I wish not everyone would just chase the iPhone, as there is plenty that could be done in the mobile computer space that would be compelling if everything was not a buttonless, thin slab of touch-sensitive glass.
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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.
At the same time though, limited tools can lead to creativity. I know we're in the company of coders with complex workflows, but using and understanding a limited tool well to the point where you can max it out can be better than living with a "long tail" of untapped power and productivity. Strange though, how the iPad is ostensibly a much better device given the touchscreen and keyboard (and now pencil) and yet rema…
I guess some people like to be managed and set strict boundaries, but that's a far cry from creativity. If creativity happens, as it always does, its despite these hard limits
The 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…
Personal computers started open, the iPad started as closed. The author is trying to get the twain to meet. Myself, I've always seen the iPad as a "media consumption device" (despite the amazing Procreate) and never bothered to try to shoehorn it into another role. My laptop and desktops will remain my primary devices forever I suspect.
I see it that way too, but I also see some confusion in their product line towards "the top". The iPad mini or even a regular iPad makes for a fantastic media consumption device, the only place any other device has those beat is a Kindle for books but that's another conversation. But when it comes to the iPad Pro, I always had a hard time figuring out what Apple's pitch for it was over a Macbook Air. Apple always pitched how portable the iPad Pro was but it's a hard sell when they have the Macbook Air which is smaller. And it's not even a competition in terms of use cases, iPad limits you in some pretty serious ways while the Air (especially with the new M1 processor) can chew through stuff normally reserved for i7's on a desktop. My brother asked me if he should get himself an iPad Pro for work (he's a real-estate agent). I told him outside of the use case of walking around a house and pulling up home plans or something, the Air is kicking the iPad's ass in every single category.
The 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…
3 devices sounds a lot, but what do people normally travel with? Probably 2, laptop and phone? Considering how light the iPad is it’s not a big addition to slip in an ipad in your bag. Sounds great you just use your thinkpad ubuntu, but what’s the battery life on that compared to iPad? My experience has been that installing Ubuntu on laptops dramatically reduced its battery life.
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> You'd think depending on the person, they'd travel with EITHER their phone OR their iPad OR their laptop, depending on whether they are private people, non-technical "creatives" or IT/technical/dev folks, but instead, everybody appears to be travelling with ALL THREE devices instead I can't answer a call or text my family with my laptop while I'm on the go. I can't plug my macbook into a car to use maps or play mus…
> I can't answer a call or text my family with my laptop while I'm on the go That's interesting, for me, any texting (usually via whatsapp or signal) is far, far more convenient on the laptop than on the phone, so far that if I expect a longer response, I'll rather find a place to sit and pull out the laptop than try to type all of it on the phone; and for calling people also videocalls on laptop are more convenient…
But in the US at least, people outside those groups typically don't. I don't think you can (easily) send SMS from a laptop as though it were your phone.
(Yes, it could be argued that the two groups in the first paragraph are actually ONE group, since Apple "texting" is silently-to-the-user shifted to iMessaging, i.e. another app.)