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Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by Terretta on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:57AM (#22170507)
Fully agree.

I think Gruber’s dead wrong, and folks should try it for a couple months. Leave the Macbook or Win10 laptop at home, and force yourself to rewire your brain into the iPad affordances and apps.

Aside from being able to turn his complaint off:

To turn Multitasking features on or off, go to Settings > Home Screen & Dock > Multitasking then turn off Allow Multiple Apps if you don't want to use Slide Over or Split View.

I think it works fine for business and development consumption and creation, both.

I’ve daily drivered iPad Pro with Apple keyboard for last 3 generations of iPad 12.9”. It started as an experiment to see if we could move employee population over for less support costs, and then became a habit because it’s just too ideal if you’re mobile for travel or even between multiple offices and meetings.

Each new Macbook model, I get nostalgic for MBP days and carry it around for a bit, and then realize too many compromises carrying a laptop compared to carrying or traveling with just the iPad Pro.

I’m on a two week trip right now, with the brand new top of line Macbook Pro 16” with full dev and Adobe setup in my bag. But it only came out of my carry on once in two weeks, and that was a failure.

Tried to display a web demo, some custom diagramming, and a PowerPoint on conference room screen from the laptop. Unable to use the enterprise guest WiFi due to their security proxies, and the hotspot was too slow. Popped the same USB-C HDMI adapter in the iPad, and showed all the content over LTE.

In a room built for Windows world, people struggled, and failed, to get HDMI from their HP or Dell or Lenovo laptops working, via HDMI ports or USB-C ports. Both the Macbook and iPad “just worked” with Apple’s same latest USB-C to HDMI adapter.

With the always on networking, all day battery life, decent choice of text based dev tools including code editors, git clients, and terminals like Blink (mosh) to do git-commit based development/deployment, Citrix and RSA and enterprise VPN, not to mention full O365 and Adobe suites (though I recommend Affinity now), it’s hard to figure out what it is I need the laptop for enough to deal with the PITA of carrying it.

This was not true 10 years ago, but today, iPad Pro can be the sole computing device even for an enterprise technology executive.

Bonus anecdata, I’ve recently noticed the iPad Pro is what’s used by 80% of folks in the board room, even though it’s a Windows based enterprise. Something’s changed.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by dkarl on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @11:22AM (#22170788)
folks should try it for a couple months. Leave the Macbook or Win10 laptop at home, and force yourself to rewire your brain into the iPad affordances and apps

Stop using other devices and give yourself a few months to learn the basics? This is how I used to encourage people to try desktop Linux in 2001.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by sixstringtheory on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @01:09PM (#22172204)
I share a similar experience as parent. I only use my laptop for compiling iOS apps, almost everything else happens on my iPad Pro 10" with keyboard (want to upgrade to the larger size next). I don't think it takes months to learn the basics, but it does to work out all the little annoying differences between an iPad and MBP in your workflows, some of which aren't everyday things. The iPad isn't perfect, but it is great IMO.
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by RandallBrown on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @01:03PM (#22172128)
It's not giving people time to learn the basics. It's giving people time to retrain their brain because it's a different device that solves problems differently.
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by Terretta on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:23PM (#22174197)
That’s also how you get habituals to stop complaining O365 isn’t Blackberry Work, or any other change to a tool that had become ‘second nature’.

You have to unlearn or overwrite the second nature.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by egypturnash on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @05:20PM (#22174731)
You also have to be prepared for many weeks of the special frustration of not knowing how to do a thing, or if it even can be done, and of any task potentially turning into a multi-hour rabbit hole of trying to figure out if and how to do it.
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by tasogare on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @11:44AM (#22171057)
> folks should try it for a couple months. Leave the Macbook or Win10 laptop at home, and force yourself to rewire your brain into the iPad affordances and apps.

Hell no. The iPad is a nice PDF reading machine with its retina display and the pencil is a joy to use but the device is barely usable for any text entry and don't support any real programming workflow.

However some shortcomings can also be positive, in particular I find the limited multi-tasking really helpful to concentrate on the reading of a paper, which is way way harder on a desktop computer with three screens, dozens of tabs opened and multiple running applications.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by Terretta on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:26PM (#22174220)
You seem a little overconfident that it’s unusable for text entry or programming workflow.

I type holes through the rubber keyboard skin in about 6 - 9 months I do so much text entry. Silk screened key caps are mostly gone by month 3.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by HeWhoLurksLate on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @05:43PM (#22174925)
Have you considered a mechanical keyboard? Those generally last a lot longer- like the switches are rated for something like 50 million presses, and if you get some good keycaps, you should be set for life.

r/mechanicalkeyboards is a good place to go for help, esp. if you check the wiki.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by derefr on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @09:04PM (#22176472)
Is there a mechanical keyboard... keyboard cover?

(I already know the answer is no, but it'd certainly be neat.)

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by mattkrause on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @05:28PM (#22174800)
That....doesn't seem like a feature!
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by hsitz on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @07:39PM (#22175904)
iPad is not just great machine to read on, it's a great machine to write on, too. There are loads of excellent editors to write in, e.g., iVim, iA Writer, Scrivener, Ulysses. I use an iPad Pro in portrait mode (i.e., vertical orientation) with a Microsoft Wedge bluetooth keyboard. It's a great writing environment.
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by HeWhoLurksLate on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @05:25PM (#22174773)
Are you using a physical keyboard, or an on-screen one? The Windows touch keyboard isn't great either.

Not a very fair comparison.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by dkonofalski on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @12:35PM (#22171677)
I agree that Gruber is wrong but only in his details. The iPad should have been much more than it is and, although I have seen it revolutionize the way that many field workers are able to do their jobs, I still think it could have been more.

On another note, I also agree with the sentiment that people should try to force themselves to use it for a bit. I used to work for a company that did corporate software/hardware training and we'd always get people that were switching from a PC to a Mac that never bothered to even attempt to use their Macs differently and constantly complained about their company forcing them to switch. Once they stopped trying to right-click on everything and got used to dragging and dropping and just trying to discover things, they always got won over and preferred their Macs. This was during the early days of OS X and reached peak around Snow Leopard. I really like the newer macOS releases too but I wish they would focus more on fixing bugs and driving back to that discoverability that really made things intuitive to use.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by Terretta on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:44PM (#22174379)
My guess, it’s something about how a developer team or UX team experience the device themselves.

Given the mockery of the “what’s a computer?” ad, I’m guessing most are spending a majority of their time on other devices, and not living with this enough to envision the experiences it’s more than capable of providing.

Failure of imagination vs. failure of technology.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by blt on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @09:31PM (#22176648)
I like your point about field workers. The iPad is a great replacement for a clipboard with a multi-page form.
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by dkonofalski on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @12:44PM (#22183465)
Yeah... one of the things I'm leading in my org is the changeover from paper forms and surveys for field workers to completely digital forms with automations for recording, reporting, and email. It's seriously been a game-changer for some groups.
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by ChrisLTD on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @11:58AM (#22171235)
Tried to display a web demo, some custom diagramming, and a PowerPoint on conference room screen from the laptop. Unable to use the enterprise guest WiFi due to their security proxies, and the hotspot was too slow. Popped the same USB-C HDMI adapter in the iPad, and showed all the content over LTE.

Seems like a great argument for buying a Windows laptop with built in LTE, and/or pressuring Apple to add LTE to MacBooks.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by Terretta on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:35PM (#22174306)
First, it’s a terrible argument for it, main point was none of the Windows machines (employees not on the guest network) could sync with the HDMI screen via their array of HDMI and UBC-C ports? Driver problems, settings problems, screen management challenges ... LTE chip doesn’t solve that. (OK, Mac with LTE would kick ass. Apple need to port “low data mode” over to MacOS.)

Second, how many Windows or Mac laptops angle the screen from the middle of the base thanks to no touchpad, so the whole thing fits on a short airplane keyboard tray, or take no room on a cafe table, and are as easy to carry around as a legal pad in a folio?

https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare...

The new generation isn’t ‘origami’, it’s firm on your lap w/o a table as well.

// I also have all the various Surfaces, and other brands’ attempts to achieve similar form factors in Windows. Better than old iPad origami keyboard nonsense, worse than new iPad smart keyboard.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by mediaman on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @11:42AM (#22171029)
What do you use for text input? A case with integrated keyboard, or separate bluetooth keyboard, or something else?
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by BryantD on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @12:12PM (#22171391)
FWIW, I use the Smart Keyboard Folio from Apple for a somewhat different use case (pure writing) and I am pretty comfortable sitting down in a coffee shop and writing a few thousand words. It's certainly not as good as a mechanical keyboard, but it's convenient enough to make me comfortable traveling with just the iPad.
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by Terretta on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:41PM (#22174361)
Agree with you, it’s easy to type.

For whatever reason, I prefer this new generation iPad Pro smart keyboard from Apple over the MBP keyboards from 2015 till this fall’s re-released ‘old’ keyboards on MBP.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by EamonnMR on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @12:23PM (#22171532)
> Tried to display a web demo, some custom diagramming, and a PowerPoint on conference room screen from the laptop. Unable to use the enterprise guest WiFi due to their security proxies, and the hotspot was too slow. Popped the same USB-C HDMI adapter in the iPad, and showed all the content over LTE.

This sounds like more a symptom of wifi's universal awfulness than a failure of the MPB though. I generally use my phone as a wifi hotspot when I'm on my laptop for the same reason.

Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by Terretta on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:39PM (#22174329)
Agree, as it happened both competing carriers on my iPhone were having too bad of a day for the higher bandwidth needs of a full laptop vs. a tablet.
Re:The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10 by bhewes on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:52PM (#22174463)
Same here. Though I forced myself to use Android exclusively for two years as my mobile computer. I added an 11inch Ipad Pro to my daily bag and I could not be happier.