“Getting the iPad to Pro — by Craig Mod”
He’s much more optimistic than I am.
“On a gut level, today’s iPad hardware feels about two or three years ahead of its software.”
I’d say 5 years and falling further behind with every hardware update.
@baldur I hadn't seen his post, thanks. Seems that 'the-iPad-is-super-fast-but-iOS-limits-its-usefulness' is a common thread recently.
@jack It's kind of always been the case since the first iPad Pro but it's just become embarrassing with the latest update.
The hardware is so powerful and the software is so so iPhone focused and detached from the needs of productivity and creativity in general (esp. writing) that it's almost ludicrous.
It's priced as a laptop. As powerful as a laptop. With a better screen than most laptops. But it can only to a tiny fraction of the normal laptop tasks due to arbitrary limitations in iOS:
@baldur curious as to what you find limiting when writing on an iPad. For example, I actually like having the constraint of a single app on screen while writing, particularly when writing long-form.
@uncrtn Text selection. Text selection. Text selection.
The functionality and ergonomics of text selection in iOS are absolutely horrible when using an external keyboard. That's my primary beef. All of the arguments Apple makes against adding touchscreens to Mac? Yeah, those apply equally against using an iPad with an external keyboard. Except with an iPad you can't use an external trackpad or mouse.
And writing for a lot of people requires the use of a ton of research, notes and references. That generally means a lot of browser tabs and quick switching between the browser and the writing app, esp. when you're writing longer texts.
Which is very awkward given the constraints in iOS and hard to fix because there are fundamental limitations to how useful non-touch external screens can be in a touch-only OS.
You're also let down by iOS Safari, which just isn't in the same class as the desktop version. And it doesn't really matter how good the competitors are because you can't change the default browser.
If you're working with images, you also need to easily switch to and from a graphics app, which gets very clunky very quickly in iOS if you're making iterative changes to the graphics (edit text, update image, edit text, update image, etc.).
Finally, even on a desktop it's really easy for me to come up against the limitations of an 8gb laptop just because of the browser tabs I have open and are relevant to my current task.
The 4-6gb the current iPads Pro come with is barely enough.
For a lot of people, involved writing tasks on the iPad are just horribly, horribly awkward and most of it (except the RAM issue) is down to intentional iOS limitations.
@baldur Text selection and browser limitations are fair points. As for research, I tend to collect all research (links, notes, etc) on a single document then slide it over for reference or drag and drop when needed. Just a different workflow I suppose.
@baldur I think this thread makes the case for the Pixel Slate. What I think is most intriguing is the containerization that Google is adding to Chrome OS, and I think that is a model Apple could follow if they wanted.
@frankm ChromeOS isn't quite there yet but it's improving quickly.
Android apps are still a little bit too isolated from the rest of the system and Linux apps are still on the unstable side.
But, even though I've been very annoyed at ChromeOS in the past, it's just a matter of time before the OS is a fully-fledge, fully capable general purpose computing platform.
And I think there's a decent chance that ChromeOS and the Pixel Slate will get there before iPad Pro+iOS does.