I really agree with this. I love my iPad and use it daily. And it definitely is getting better on being able to do most of what I need a computer to do, yet I still have to use my MBP from time to time. What’s frustrating is that this is a choice. And it might not even be a “choice” modern Apple is making…they are living with the choice they made when the iPad came out, and they keep having to work within that little sandbox of (basically) iOS.
Some things that come to mind:
True 100% compatible browser functionality (or at least as functioned as macOS Safari)
Ideally, I’d like to see them allow other rendering engines for other browsers to have true competition, something I don’t think we are getting in the U.S. right?
Time Machine…why in the world is my only backup solution iCloud? Allow me to hook the iPad up (or wireless connect to) a disk and run Time Machine (or something like Carbon Copy Cloner). I’d love to be able to have my iPad download all my photos and then back those up to a drive
Allow Backblaze-style offsite backups (see point above)
Improve/allow proper IDEs on the iPad (I don’t want to have to use Codespaces on my iPad or go through backflips to make it work…where’s my VSCode?
Put XCode on the iPad. It’s an M2 for crying out loud…the same thing in laptops that run XCode just fine
Improve audio handling (not just for podcasters, btw)…the audio structure on iPadOS that kills sounds when an app opens is weird
Those are just some things off the top of my head at the moment.
That being said, I like Stage Manager quite a bit and it’s improved my ability to get things done on my iPad (e.g., a tax form open, my tax software loaded, and a calculator all at once…pretty great). There’s some weird things they still need to work out (that dang keyboard icon is KILLING me), of course, but they are getting there.
Agreed; this was a good, balanced discussion that highlighted some of the improvements we’re talking. I thought it was better because Myke was more down on the iPad, too. I enjoy respectful contrasts (in this thread as well!)
(When I first replied to this thread, I didn’t realize Denny was talking about a specific post. Then I heard the Upgrade segment on a new scorecard and it clicked.)
I think you are hitting the nail on the head for where my thinking is. It’s not the iPad that’s the problem. It’s iPadOS. I know we roll them together for sake of discussion, and that’s ok (and probably correct). But really all my complaints really have to do with what Apple is allowing/disallowing via software.
I have found Myke’s iPad journey very illuminating. He went all in on the iPad (he was a Mac guy first, of course) then worked his way back out to the Mac. His reasons are very sound and reasoned…he’s not mad or anything, but he accepted he was just fighting it way too much (especially once Apple Silicon rolled out). Very understandable and relatable journey, I feel like.
In some ways, I think I could be on that same path except I just love the form factor of the iPad. Being able to have it in the Magic Keyboard thing, use it like a laptop, do some work on it, then pop it off, spin it to portrait mode, and read a magazine is amazing. Oh and marking up PDFs/filling out forms – AMAZING.
If Apple (and I don’t think they would do this) would make a Mac version of the MS Surface (dock it to the keyboard, pop it out and have a tablet running macOS), I’d insta-buy that product. No question.
As I was reading @Denny’s blog post, I was reminded of Myke a year or two ago, when he occasionally vented about people not giving the iPad the respect he thought it was due.
I struggle to pay any attention to a lot of people I used to find really informative in the Apple arena. I basically follow the Daring Fireball RSS feed and mourn the loss of Rene Ritchie to YouTube (I used to have the opposite problem and found Gruber’s insight narrow minded but now everything is flipped on it’s head because we live in opposite world).
I used to listen to a bunch of Relay FM podcasts but now can’t stand to because of the issues with bias and lack of ability to consider any use case beyond their own. I don’t know what caused the change but so many of the Apple commentariat are so miserable about anything that isn’t directly to their personal preference.
One of my favourite examples of unnecessarily long words is floccinaucinihilipilification. It basically means the habit of dismissing or devaluing things offhand. It’s both wonderful and depressing to have a legitimate use for it.
I disagree with all of your points, but there’s no benefit in going backwards and forwards as I’m likely to repeat things I’ve said above and we’re unlikely to agree.
Indeed. I like the journeys/vectors when people are able to articulate them. And when people stay put for articulable principled reasons (not drifting when everyone else is.) I suppose what’s frustrating for observers is an unintentional stance or drift that is believed to be intentional or insightful, when that persona has an amplified voice.
iPad-specifically, one-on-one conversations seem most productive to me because I like to talk to people about things they wish they were doing, rather than how to do what they currently do on a specific device. That conversation doesn’t really scale, at least not how I have it (it starts with too many questions.)
Yes! I peaked the year I wrote a limerick that matched the meter and rhyme of floccinaucinihiliplificatious. I wish I still had it.
All valid concerns on @Denny’s part, and well-summarized by you. But building a straw man called “Pundits” and then railing on it for its imagined collective failing is as cliched a narrative as there is, and piling on to that particular cliched narrative is just groupthink all over again. It’s the pot calling the kettle lazy.
I don’t think digging deeper and using specifics to challenge vague or broad critiques, on either side, is turning a blind eye. On the contrary. It’s making the conversation better.
I think you’ve called attention to a variable that shifted the dialog 3 years ago. In the four or so years lead-up to the M1 Mac users in the pundit community were fairly frustrated. The Mac Pro was stagnating, the MacBook Pro had a screwy keyboard and the iPad seemed to be getting all the attention and had a processor that glowed with potential, getting better with each generation. At the peak of that frustration the M1 was released and the flood gates opened.
I know that’s a simplification but I think it encapsulates the tension and frustration being expressed by Mac users that were frustrated with the lack of hardware fixes on their platform and who found in the iPad an OS that was not as capable as their preferred macOS.
Agreed, with your take an Myke’s journey back to the Mac - and it seems to fit many others.
I’m with you on the form factor of the iPad. I also love it. In the course of any given day I use it on my lap en the Magic Keyboard but an hour later am likely to be using it raised up G4 iMac style in an arm attached to a shelf as I use a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. I love that as well as the touch screen.
But I also made the transition to iPadOS that many Mac users don’t make. As much as I still love the Mac I crossed over to iPadOS in such a way that I no longer struggled and in fact felt it to be the easier, more natural OS. That doesn’t seem to happen for most Mac users. Where they feel frustration and friction I feel joy and delight.
I think a strange left-over of the above process is that while Mac-first Apple using pundits (which is a large majority) were all newly relieved and very happy with their new M powers Macs, they have universally held onto both a grudge against iPadOS as well as a desire for a touch screen computer. The touch screen form factor of the iPad still speaks to them but the overall experience remains an itchy sore spot.
This is a good list! I’ve not really found any of these a problem but I can see how these are all still problems for some. Most certainly Safari and other browser rendering engines. Even Europeans aren’t getting that on iPad, only on the iPhone.
There is a Mac-based solution for automated, incremental local backups. I’ve used it for several months and it’s seems to work very well. iMazing. Install on a Mac, attach an external drive and set that to be the back-up destination. Attach the iPad via usb to do the initial backup. Future backups will happen over WiFi if you enable that option. I’ve got mine to back-up everyday at 9am. The iPad needs to be on and reachable. I keep most of my files in iCloud. But my active client design stuff is on the local storage. iMazing takes care of backing that up. It’s then possible to browse the back-up files in iMazing but it does require doing that through the app on the Mac. A bit tedious but it works.
One thing I’d like to add here, my job is as a software developer, mainly using C++ and Python. Since the iPad has never had a capability to compile and run C++ code, I’ve never considered it as a replacement for a Mac, because it is literally impossible. So when I go to work in the morning, I take my MacBook Pro and leave the iPad at home.
Since most people don’t have to compile and run C++ they try to get iPads to do everything the Mac can do and that’s when the trouble starts. If you just accept the iPad for what it is, then you are happy. If you start asking it to do things it cannot, you are sad.
I don’t complain when I can’t broil shrimp in my toaster oven. The toaster oven is not a full fledged oven, but it is great for certain things. I guess you can toast bread in a full oven, but the toaster oven is better for that.
The iPad is a great portable computer. Good for email, browsing websites and with a keyboard writing documents. In my opinion it is better than the Mac for reviewing and marking up PDF documents, even though you can do that on a Mac too.
From a user standpoint, that’s exactly what should happen. And if it remains a separate product, the iPad Pro should be running a touch optimized version of macOS, not iOS with a bunch of kludges for a large screen and keyboard/trackpad.
But it’s unlikely to happen because Apple sees itself as losing out on what they believe to be their rightful cut of revenue every time we go outside the App Store for software and services on our Macs. That’s the business reason why the new AVP’s OS is based on iOS/iPadOS and not macOS.
If they could get away with locking down macOS the same way they would, but they know a lot of us would abandon the Mac for good if that happened. And there could be collateral damage to their other product lines. I use an iPhone because it works so well with my Mac and not the other way around.
In 2023 Mac sales brought in $29.4 Billion in revenue (7.7% of Apple’s total). iPad sales revenue was $28 Billion. It would be interesting to know which brought in the most app store revenue.
That’s really interesting and I’ll have to check it out! But it still bugs that I can’t do that natively on the iPad. I don’t necessarily want to have to use a Mac to backup my iPad. Either let me plug the Time Machine drive straight into the iPad whenever I want, or perhaps let me run Time Machine (natively, not through jumping through hoops) to a target network drive.
These kind of decisions remind me that Apple doesn’t see the iPad as a truly standalone computer, but instead an accessory to a Mac. For me, I can live with that since I have Mac. But it sure would be nice to not need one.
Me neither, but something tells me Apple wouldn’t have waited 14 years to provide a backup for the iPad if that task was in their Reminders app. And I’ll bet a shiny new quarter that the Vision Pro will never get a backup app either.
As I’ve mentioned before I keep my online data on Google Drive which syncs to my Mac, but I have 50gb of iCloud data which I use as a “dropbox” for files I want to back up immediately but not store in the cloud. This allows me to save files to an iCloud folder and have Hazel move them to a corresponding folder on my Mac.
While it would be nice to have a native Time Machine like solution, I would disagree with your conclusion. Apple would say iCloud is the back-up solution. Is that ideal? Absolutely not. But one could just use iCloud for back-ups. An iCloud-based Time Machine or Time Machine with a local drive would be the best option.
While I know it’s more a synching service I’ve generally trusted iCloud document storage as my primary “backup” because I keep active work projects on the iPad storage then copy to iCloud when done. Also, again, not as safe or convenient as Time Machine or a dedicated iPad-Based app that could do incremental back-ups. I also occasionally just drag and drop important folders to an external SSD.
Again, this isn’t optimal but until I started using iMazing not long ago it’s what I’ve been doing for several years, no Mac needed.
