30 days exclusive iPad experience: I ditched the Mac for the iPad, and I’ll never go back

@airwhale I believe that Matt Mullenweg (founding developer of Wordpress) is an advocate of the DVORAK keyboard. It is supposed to be much faster, and you can switch OSX to it.

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Ah gotcha, sorry I missed that earlier :slight_smile:

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Agreed. I think the clickbaity framing we’ve seen from so many articles is unfortunate and really does a disservice to readers. A much more helpful approach would be to encourage and help readers to evaluate needs and ask questions of workflows. Then perhaps offer comparisons of different computing devices and platforms. Really, more of a how-to approach than a review. There is no one size fits all with this stuff.

Something else I see happening that is a direct result of the short time frame of reviews is ignorance of the app ecosystem and often features of the operating system. Of course it is perhaps an impossible task because the app ecosystem is huge. When reviewers say “well I can’t edit video in a professional manner because iMovie is not Final Cut Pro” they may be ignorant of the advanced alternatives such as LumaFusion. The problem is they write as though they are aware of all possibilities and make declarations without acknowledging that there may well be solutions available. I think a better approach would simply to be our workflow is x - y - z and this is what we think is missing.

To put it simply, I think the evaluation of tech should be more open ended with more questions about possibilities and fewer statements of “fact”. Computers, operating systems, apps, users, and work are too fluid. The knowledge of any one user, even an “expert” reviewer, of possible variables is far too limited for the kinds of pronouncements made in headlines. It just makes the reviewer look silly.

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It’s interesting too how much human interaction these days has been turned into a kind of battle or argument with other people’s choices being seen as a threat to one’s own choices. Rather than a celebration of all the amazing possibilities created by the hard work of engineers too much time is spent in negative take-down’s that are often not actually accurate. I guess it’s easy to get defensive and emotionally agitated even when it’s not needed. Perhaps it’s become some sort of cultural habit?

I think the world would be a better place if we all spent more time rooting each other on and enjoying the possibilities for creative interaction, learning and exploring. I think humans are at their best when they’re learning, cooperating and exploring together. #Saganinspiredquote :nerd_face:

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@Denny Well said! This has and can continue to be true of the MPU forum. :slight_smile:

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In the off-chance that you haven’t already seen it, I really liked Matt Gemmell’s post on The Big iPad. He does a very good job describing how he switched from his Mac to an iPad Pro, and what he does (and doesn’t do) with it.

Don’t just read my highlights, but here are some “teaser” quotes:

This isn’t a review, and it’s entirely about me. If you discover that we’re similar, then this’ll be useful to you. Otherwise, it’ll be more of a curiosity. That’s fine. Any review is ultimately like that; I’m just not going to pretend otherwise.

Also, be extremely skeptical of anyone who makes a judgement about switching to an iPad when they haven’t actually done it themselves (this goes for most judgements about most things throughout life). This group includes the apparent majority of tech journalists, most of whom seem to have an annual ritual of spending one week with the newest iPad, and then saying it’s not a laptop replacement yet in some general sense. How would you even know? I certainly didn’t until six months or so in.

Be wary. Be rational and critical. Don’t invite someone’s opinion into your brain without making them earn it. That goes for my words here too.

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There’s a “Can the iPad Pro Replace Your Laptop?” article on Laptop where the author actually went out an talked to pro users who are actually using the iPad Pro to get their work done (including Relay’s Mike Hurley).

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This was a good article, straight forward.

Bravo @ChrisUpchurch! This should be on a post-it on the monitor (iPad cover) of every journalist who dares to write an article for the iPad-Can/Cannot-Replace-Laptop genre. It shocks me how many journalists go into these articles with the intention of “destroying” Apple’s claims that an iPad can replace some other form of computer. The articles typically lack the kind of objectivity that you are championing.

They also lack the attention to the fun factor. People pick a computing platform that they like. My computing tasks are far more demanding then my wife’s. She tried an iPad for a while (in the pre-Pro days) and didn’t love the experience. She vastly prefers using her MacBook Air–she loves that computer.

Regardless of what you can or cannot do with an iPad today, those of us (like me) who really cherish this iPad and its promise look forward to the day when there are no compromises regarding what you can accomplish (and how easily you can accomplish that thing) between a “traditional computer” and an iPad. Those of us who want to be iPad only – for whatever reason – are not looking to survive on a dumbed-down experience, but want a robust platform that enables us to do everything we used to do and things we never thought we could do.

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This was a very good article, @ChrisUpchurch, and it adhered to your well-designed objectivity standard. My biggest takeawy from this article and my own experience using iPad as my primary computing is that biggest bottleneck right now is not the hardware, it’s not the OS (mostly, but bear with me), it’s the third-party application software and web application design.

For my job, I often have to log into my Windows machine remotely from my iPad, so I know the pain of trying to interact with a user interface that is completely different from the machine I’m working on. It is analogous with how some native apps are designed. Of course iOS will seem “flawed,” when an app is designed for iPad just like it is on the desktop. There is a different interaction model (duh!) on an iPad then there is on a multi-window, mouse-oriented interface. Developers need to re-think and reorganize their apps’ interfaces to align better with how users actually use an iPad. There are some good examples of Apps that have done this.

Besides interface improvements on the apps themselves, there are two other things developers need to do better: enable more functionality in the app because the hardware certainly enables it; use the screen real estate better. I have read so many times, including in the article you linked, about users who are frustrated that iPad apps are often just scaled up iPhone apps. That annoys me, too. But it’s not Apple’s fault, it’s the app developers. Put the information that we need on the screen and make the things we need readily accessible.

Oddly, none of the journalists ever pick on the app developers. They fault iOS for this. But until developers truly start taking the computing needs of iPad users more seriously, this problem will not go away. I am hopeful that the announcement that you can use “full strength” Photoshop on iPad will stir some other developers into action.

Websites also need to improve for mobile, although, this is a little off topic. For reasons that I will not bore everybody with here, I recently had to use American Airlines browser standing in line at TSA with my wife and three kids. It took me forever to navigate the site because it was not enabled for touch. Selecting options in dialog boxes was dreadful, inserting information was a pain, I was constantly pinching and zooming, and I swear there was 500 savages with pitchforks and torches ready to kill me. The American Airlines native app is great and is, of course, designed for a touch interface. And, of course, having boarding passes in Apple Wallet is frictionless. But I was not able to get these boarding passes into either of those options.

The point of this rant is, to truly empower this platform we need developers to step up their game and design professional grade tools that are designed for iPad.

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I don’t know how much some tech bloggers take into account that not all of us have the latest and greatest. If I’m upgrading from last year’s model to this year’s model, there are incremental changes but not enough to give me that wow experience.

Going from an iPad Mini 4 to an iPad Pro will have enough changes to give me that wow experience.

The tech bloggers have already tried out for a few days the newest review model and then returning it soon thereafter.

I usually take tech bloggers with a grain of salt when they say “nothing new here.” The older the model I’m upgrading from, the more exciting the new models are for me.

I’m still happily using my iPad Air 2. Sure, I’d love a new iPad Pro but I’d really have to find a reason to upgrade. One reason would be an app that requires the newest iOS and my old device can’t upgrade. Another reason to upgrade for me is to get better performance when a daily workhorse app I use starts slowing down and becomes annoying to use.

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Given my current spirit quest, I like this new Apple commercial.

Thanks for the video link, it’s just made my ipad pro easier to use

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How is your ipad trial going ? @Bmosbacker

I think I’m somewhere in week three. I plan to write up something towards the end of the month as I have a bit more time. I’ll seek to be concise as several have written about their experiences and there are certainly plenty of reviews. I’m going to try to be objective, based on my use case, as I possibly can be in order to be as helpful to others as possible.

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Thanks @Bmosbacker I am trying to use my ipad pro for more things now due to it’s sheer convenience, so I will certainly keep an eye out for your post and read with interest. Cheers Stuart

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Yesterday, I used my 12.9 iPad Pro to write a proposal paper on Pages. I loved the fact that it is so much easy to annotate images with the Pencil. I wrote about 500 words using only the on-screen keyboard.

I can’t wait for my new iPad Pro to arrive (hopefully this week) as it’s already for clearance at the local customs while my Apple Pencil and Keyboard folio is still on hold in Singapore.

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Appreciate the link to Gemmell’s article. He makes the case for the need to figure it out for yourself.

Update, as promised I am providing a summary of my experience. I posted my experience here.

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I agree with @Bmosbacker, very well said. I agree with you!

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