alright, alright. well, sorry my statement offended you. I’m just saying:
a) if you’re on an iPad, you’re not doing resource intensive work
b) I still value your point of view, regardless of whether you’re a power user
c) university is a pretty general use case
Additionally, I would say you’re probably a power user based on the fact that you a) listen to MPU and b) are in this forum.
Apologies if my statements were offensive, that wasn’t my intention.
True. I will try to avoid this mistake in the future.
Again, I’d like to apologize for anything I said that came across as offensive.
I’m an iPad-only user and can’t imagine doing anything intensive on it though!
Wall. Of. Text.
Sorry!
@wolfie Interesting (in a sad way) that we’re accusing each other of elitism. There must be some resolvable conflict here.
I was not dressing up an ad-hominem attack, though. I am an information systems researcher. I study technology use. I did not mean to offend by suggesting that your work is not complex (why that would matter at all is a whole other discussion). But there must be some kind of difference between why my experience with the iPad (and others I know) is different from yours.
A simple model of technology theory is that technology use involves an Interaction between a Human, a Computer (pun unintended), and a Task.
That gives us four broad variables:
Variance in one of these variables accounts for differences in experience.
Given that we’re talking about the same Computer, and I am assuming the Humans are equal (again, I was not passing judgment on you; I of course hope you’re not passing judgment on me), it could be the Task, or it could be the Interaction.
You seem to be arguing that:
My experience (which may be anecdotal, but that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant; I’d argue that rigorous analysis of workflow a form of auto-ethnography) counters that. I do like the iPad. I only want to chuck it at the wall when it fails at a (large variety of) Task(s). So, I think it’s the Task that’s to blame—and because it’s not a specific task that fails, but a variety of them, I think it’s general task complexity.
Complexity in no way means “greater” or “more difficult.” I’m roughly defining complexity like so:
To adapt that framework to computer tasks, I think about what the Human needs to act on to achieve the Task. In other words, the number of objects (and the kind of objects) that need to be managed while completing a task.
My work usually involves referencing and managing many concepts at the same time. There’s little pattern to what I’ll need, when. Therefore I have found I need something like clipboard history, file system access, “desktop”-like space, and so on to be able to achieve that. I have tried real hard to use iPads to do this kind of work, but even when I’ve found a good workflow for one scenario, it fails the next time.
If this is also true of your work, then maybe my hypothesis is wrong. If so, what else is it about the Task that accounts for the difference? Or is it something else? (Am I an idiot?)
Like any tool, it’s not always suitable for every conceivable application. A good friend of mine is an architect and the software he needs doesn’t exist on macOS and does not have a macOS analogue. That doesn’t mean the Mac isn’t an excellent general use computer. It means he has to choose the right tool for the job.
There is no arbitrary threshold of usefulness required to be a general use computer and if there was you’d have to do a lot better to justify how you fall outside that threshold but me and people like me do not. That is a privileged attitude.
@wolfie Ahem, well, actually, design and technology research has tried really hard to think about such a threshold. Affordance theory has been used in Information Systems to work towards such an understanding. I couldn’t find any one paper to point at for the fundamentals, but Anderson and Robey’s work is interesting and illustrative:
It gets at my point: computers (“systems”, in the diagram) have features that, combined with user abilities, lead to some kind of actualized functionality. I’m arguing that in most Actual Contexts, macOS’s features lead to better affordances for that functionality. That’s the “arbitrary threshold of usefulness.” I may be wrong, but that just means that the iPad’s more fulfilling of that threshold, not that the threshold doesn’t exist.
I get it; the iPad has not met your expectations. We could debate those expectations but I don’t think Apple have ever pitched the iPad as a replacement for a MacBook. I think they have demonstrated that the iPad is not just some content consumption toy and that it is a computer in the same sense as a Mac. They’ve never suggested equivalence.
@wolfie Exactly. But! My ire comes from the fact that my expectations have been established by the community’s framing of the iPad. I’m arguing that should be revoked.
I do appreciate the notion that I’m falsely equating general purpose, university use, and complex work.
Those things are probably not the same, if only because the idea of “general purpose computing” has widened quite a bit in recent years. A computer is less something that manages files and data and more a way to read and connect with others. If that’s now what we’re calling “general purpose”, I’d agree with that.
My issue with iPad recommendation still stands. I think folks should hesitate to suggest the iPad unless use case is really well-understood. As @WayneG said, choose the software first. To which I would specify, choose the different apps you need—and how they interact—first.
Bravo! I think this is the best post I’ve ever seen on the forum.
Correct me if i’m wrong, but here’s a summary:
I would agree. iPads are general use computers. This is pretty certain. But for most situations, a Mac is a(n) equivalent/better general use computer.
Could I get a copy of that paper you referenced?
My kids are in elementary and middle school, and we’re subjected to not one but two LMSs - one for classwork being assigned and submitted, the other for recording and reporting grades (go figure - I can see assignments given in LMS #1, but the grades for the work they’ve turned in there get recorded in LMS #2). And then a third service/app for receiving communications from the school administrators
Both LMSs are web-based but also offer iOS apps, at least for parents. The kids have Chromebooks and everything seems to work OK for them there, but the parent experience in both LMSs is just terrible - and worse on the iOS apps, which appear to be wrappers for Webkit but somehow worse than a regular web interface.
Well, and there are two aspects of that - the tool and the task. Safari as a browser in general, and a mobile browser in particular, from a web development point of view, seems to be much more of a “moving target” than some of the others (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) with its power management, background suspension, etc. LMS software probably pushes the edges of the tech more so than other websites.
Then there’s also the fact that the platform itself hobbles competition in the browser space (or at least used to?) by requiring that all browsers on iOS be Webkit - so no alternate rendering engine is available.
Personally, I think that if a legit Chrome port that absolutely lied about its UA (“Google Chrome on a Windows 10 laptop here. iPad? Me? No, I think you have me mistaken for somebody else. I’m a Lenovo IdeaPad.” 
) were available for the iPad, a lot of these sites would WORK just fine. But the auto-detection and the stubbornness of iOS apps to tell the truth makes that an untested hypothesis at this point.
I think that’s probably at least somewhat reasonable. Many in the community frame it that way. The thing I think you’re really driving at though is ads like this:
where at the end, after seeing the child take photos, do art, chat with their friends, presumably do some sort of homework / writing, etc., their parent says “what are you doing on your computer?” and the kid says “what’s a computer?”
This carries at least the implicit assumption that a computer is something unknown to the child. Which would mean that everything they’re required to do for school / play / etc. can be done on their iPad Pro.
Of course the wisdom of turning a kid loose with a $1000 iPad and a $200 keyboard case is a whole different can of worms, but if we ASSUME that the kid gets to tote around $1200 worth of iOS hardware it’s kind of implied that a “computer” can be a thing of the past.
While ads aren’t concrete marketing claims, and are intended to be a touch forward-looking, I agree that it’s a little misleading due to the software / hardware cocktail not being quite there yet - to the point where I think the majority of people are going to run into something that they can’t do on the iPad.
It may be perfectly capable for just about everything the average person does where they have some reasonable choice about the workflow, though. Most of these use cases where the iPad falls down - for the average person - tend to come from a third party’s dictates that they do X task in manner Y on platform Z. If, instead of saying “you’ll type your report in our proprietary web form, and submit it using our LMS” it turned into “you’ll type your report in a word processor of your choice, and email in a PDF”, that’s do-able on the iPad out of the box.
Not that that matters, because third-party demands are part of the real-world experience - but it’s a distinction worth noting. 
“All computers are equal, but some are more equal than others”? 
Just a quick clarification: I was disclaiming that my post was a wall of text, and apologizing for that!
Nah, it’s “all computers can accomplish most of your tasks, but some computers are better suited for it”
Same here. Statistical programs, I believe, are probably beyond the capabilities of an iPad Pro (and I’m sure that will lead one person to challenge my position with some sort of home brew and hacky set of shortcuts that sort of get the job done as a counterpoint).
But citation software (Mendeley, Endnote) for the most part are crappy for anything but reading and annotating PDFs in. I’ve never been able to get any of them the work satisfactorily in cite-as-you-write scenarios that didn’t involve a bunch of cut and paste hoops.
I’ve looked into this before. If you use a citation manager with an API then you could query it using Shortcuts and pull the data related to the source you want to cite, then style it according to the citation style, then copy it to clipboard 
UGH, lol as I was saying
I generally find the iPad to be better at doing my most difficult work, that requires a lot of thinking. The Mac (or Windows) is better at a middle band of work that requires efficiently manipulating information artifacts (in IDEs, sound editors, Photoshop, data management software, etc.), where the ratio of thinking to activity is more even. Technical university work requires more of that middle band work.
The iPad is also very good at general communication work, and unfortunately, many universities require communication to flow through software that hasn’t been written for iPad. Between that and the need to perform that middle band of efficient technical work, an iPad is often the wrong choice.
However, at a sensible university that doesn’t saddle its students with bad software, and pushes its students to do as much difficult thinking as possible, an iPad can be the primary computing device, and in a pure liberal arts program, likely the only device with strong outcomes.
This has been an even more thrilling thread than I’d anticipated! Thanks all for the discussion and debate. Responding to a few semi-random points below.
Thanks for the kind words. That looks like an apt summary, although I imagine it can all be argued the other way too!
Okay, okay, I relent. This isn’t my goal, but I see how my arguments and this one are one and the same.
I do think we need good definitions for terms like “power user”. (For me it’s someone who is using the most of the technology they have. If you imagine a tool as providing a “space” of possible features, a power user’s tool use occupies as much of that feature space as possible.)
But that’s not the point—I was equating general use, undergraduate study, and complex work, which isn’t only false, but also probably a comparison of incomparables. I still think the iPad is not a good choice for the kinds of multi-object multi-step processes I describe when discussing complexity above. But I also think that the iPad is certainly a power user tool and there’s clearly folks who can do more with it than I’ve been able to do.
I think the core of our disagreement could be about whether the multi-object multi-step processes—the “information artifacts” @cornchip points to—are a general or specific use case. (The different interpretation is probably due to the scale of our experience.) It’s everything I do, but if it’s not some or most of what most other people are doing, then you’re right, I’m running around with a vermillion fish.
Two more brief apologies:
)You’re so right. I have a bunch of issues with web apps on iPadOS but it’s probably all to blame on the missing Chromium engine and/or the dependence of the web on that engine.
True! This points toward the need for a kind of task agnosticism: “platforms” (for lack of a better catch-all term) should boil down the ability to contribute as much as possible.
Interesting. I don’t want to drag this thread on, but I’d like to hear more about why you find this to be the case.
I, too, like taking the iPad and a good text editor or Concepts away from my desk to think things through sometimes. In my experience, though, I end up returning to the desk within minutes after I’ve built up some cognitive momentum because the iPad starts to slow me down. It’s an interesting interplay, and I always end up feeling like I would’ve been better off had I not picked up the tablet in the first place.
Conversely: give me my iPad, Drafts, Concepts/iThoughts and some Post-It notes, and I’ll be pretty much good to go the rest of the day. Horses for courses, as it’s said.
From a practical usability standpoint, iPads and Chromebooks have the same issue in education – the incompatibility of online proctoring software. Most, if not all, proctoring software requires students use a machine capable of recording their desktop, listening via the microphone, watching via a webcam, while taking a test in an LMS at the same time. Even if an iPad or Chromebook could do all of that, the proctoring software for those devices doesn’t exist yet.
Yes, it’s like that—but instead of using the iPad to build up cognitive momentum (which it’s great at, absolutely), I’m talking about using it to think through something completely, as you’d do with pen and paper (or just staring into space.) Developing a language, an original idea for an essay, a complex organizational problem, writing or dissecting poetry, etc. For people like me, who can’t fully gather their thoughts when seated at a powerful computer with fast Internet, it’s wonderful for those tasks because it speeds up typing/diagramming/drawing, and editing, without introducing many distractions. It also keeps me from escaping from the difficult thinking work into iterative production which precludes a certain depth of work if done too early (unless I’ve time to throw out and redo those prototypes—large projects often don’t provide that, so I really need that early concentration to deliver insights early.)
If it’s something I am just going to bang out and edit as I go along, or I know what I’m doing and am stuck getting started, I agree I’d be wasting my time not just starting on the most productive fastest editor/tool on the Mac.
Edit, sorry, so the point of all this is that there are paths through university where you’re going to do much better work if you can give yourself enough of that more pure thinking and concepting time that I find the iPad to be better at, so I think it’s kind of tragic that LMS make that impossible at many schools.
Oh, it’s the latter. Every time.
An interesting data point for me on iPad versus Mac lately has been Affinity Designer. I can, and do, tweak designs on my iPad and I love that while this is a completely different experience, the result is the same as if I did it on my Mac.
That doesn’t mean I actually like the iPad interface paradigm (as implemented by Affinity products) or that I am as productive, but the true 100% compatibility of the results is so fantastic that I persevere on the iPad because I know at any point I can simply return to the Mac if something gets too hard.
Half of the reason schools don’t allow iPads is because of Adobe Flash. Thankfully, time is ticking…
