i hate that animations on ios are i/o blocking.
every single time i have to enter my passcode, it misses at least one if not two of my keypresses, which means i have to erase the whole thing and do it more slowly since the missing keypresses are essentially random (not just the final one or two).
another related annoyance is alert popups that occur more than once. the bounce animation takes over a second, so if you have multiple of these coming in succession, which happens constantly, it's a collossal waste of focus and time.
i want to take a sledgehammer to my idevices every time these things happen.
These forced animations make tasks take the same amount of time regardless of how fast the hardware gets. I would love to be able to turn off all animations in iphone/ipad UIs.
Somehow got the "6" key is stuck lit up, and despite having definitely registered a tap, it wasn't included in the addition.
Well, it's already made pretty useless by not showing you what's it's calculating…
the computer should serve the whims of the user, not the other way around.
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/11/12/accelerate/
I still use an iPhone 4S, and thanks to this tweak, I don't feel like my phone is any slower than newer models. Pity I can't browse half the web though (https died due to TLS).
Animations still take the same amount of time blocking interactivity.
In my experience with that whole line I really feel like only the 17" truly deserved the "pro" moniker since it got better options (processors, matte display) than the others.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Disp...
I hate iOS because the movement limit before a tap gets cancelled is too small for my tastes - simulating "virtual" clicks at 10px limit of motion worked better for my tastes using a browser. Maybe I am just lazy, maybe the capacitance or shape of my fingers is the problem, or maybe I have some motor issue. However I don't on Android devices. I have to allow myself time on iOS devices to make taps work reliably.
I notice it especially on the home screen of my iPad where lazy tapping an app won't open it... Grrrr - there is no other function to a "slight" scroll on the homescreen!
I have seen others have the same issue, so it isn't just me.
I guess this is some kind of legacy thing because the first iphone wouldn't have been able to handle it? Because this seems like an exceptionally bad decision, unless absolutely necessary for some reason.
There's also zero lag scrolling through Google Photos. I don't have an iPhone to compare to, but I can't imagine how it could get any better.
If this is actually still a problem 10 years after the linked article was posted, I'd say the main problem is then instead the variety of processing in Android devices. I'd guess I'd see these issues on cheaper phones (maybe I can dig up one of my $79 burners to try with), but I doubt this problem exists on any phones of comparable pricing to iPhones.
Comparing iOS to "Android" might show some clunky/laggy UI in cheaper models, but comparing iOS to iPhone-priced Android phones most certainly won't (most of the time).
[*]: Though, obviously, I expect the sheer amount of variety in Android phones to still produce some expensive, low-power phones that would be an exception here.
It's a frustrating design decision to me as well, maybe because I'd much rather prefer a barebones, stripped-down, streamlined experience, but I'm sure it's more psychologically soothing for more people when compared to the laggy experience on some competing devices.
Wow, I have the same trouble, but I thought it was because my iPhone was old and thus the screen was damaged.
It seems like they have everything lined up to put MacOS on the iPad, but it would be so unlike them to do it. What’ll they say, you can dual boot but you only boot MacOS if you have their expensive keyboard case attached? They wouldn’t do that.
Maybe someone will hack it on there eventually. An M1 MacOS on an M1 iPad “hackintosh” doesn’t seem impossible.
Big Sur already takes a lot of design cues from iOS - they're prepping the merge. They're just making sure the frog doesn't realize the pot is starting to boil.
It would probably be an opt-in thing for apps, but even without any fancy state replication it'd be just fine.
Sheesh, the browser doesn't even have devtools.
(only grouchy because I'd love to get one if it wasn't so crippled)
12.9 inch iPad is starting to look like a 12 inch MacBook. All you need is the OS upgrade.
It going to be really interesting to see if/how/when they unify their entire ecosystem.
maybe for gamers?
> something that actually uses all that juice they keep shoving inside, I just... don't see the point
Is this a joke or something? Video and image editing was actually the biggest selling point shown repeatedly all over the keynote.
- Draw. This is the big one. I'm no fine artist, but I do a bit of calligraphy now and then, and Procreate is amazing.
- Make memes. It might not be more "productive" to caption funny pictures on my iPad than it would be to do it on desktop, but it's more fun. It feels more natural to manipulate images on a tablet.
- Read PDFs. the 12.9" iPad is carefully sized to make US letter and A4 documents readable. I'll load a PDF up in one of the zones of my wide monitor if I'm using it as a reference for a slide deck or whatever, but if I'm just reading it, it's the iPad for me.
- Edit video. I doubt I would stick with this work flow if I were a dedicated content creator. But I'm not, and stitching some footage off my mirrorless camera together, putting a soundtrack to it: the iPad makes this pleasant.
- Look at photos. Also, showing them to other people. A couple weeks ago I took my iPad with me to the mechanic to show some pictures I had taken of my front bumper, lamentably separated from the rest of the vehicle in a fender bender. A phone might have sufficed, but a tablet is obviously better and I have one. When I'm in the mood to scroll through my memories, the iPad is the place to do it.
- Twitter. This is the inflection point! I had a phase of taking my Twitter time on the tablet, and went back to using my laptop. Scrolling with a flick of the pencil is nice, but inputting text is very much not its strong suit, and there are ads. I don't like ads.
Edited to add: I'm heavy on the gizmos. If I had to ditch one, it would be the iPad, and I have no interest in upgrading my 3rd gen whatsoever. But I'm glad I don't have to ditch it! For what it's good for, it really shines. I'm fond of it.
I would kill for a good Linux tablet with low latency pen input. Xournal++ and Krita would be completely sufficient.
Most apps and ideas I initially liked on the iPad, would be much better FOSS. So many apps ultimately fail for me because the developers trying hard to wall some garden, instead of implementing export/import of an open standard.
Oh and ofc, horrible file management and no code execution.
Fuck this shit. Stallman was right...
- reading pdf and books
- import and watch photos
- write notes and draw sketches and plans with the pencil
- bring along in the shop
I also use it as a laptop sometimes, with an external keyboard. As a linux/vim user, anything with an ssh client is good enough to get work done anyway. I still find it preferable to a windows machine.
Same, and this is how the iPad really shines, except for one huge drawback: limited RAM means I either have to reduce my art to sub-4k quality or limit it to 30-ish layers.
Both options suck. It was very disappointing to see no mention of RAM anywhere in this announcement. Maybe for some applications processing speed is a limiting factor, but it certainly isn't the bottleneck for artists, so this announcement is a bit of a letdown.
It's not natural to have your monitor and keyboard super close together, and to have your monitor sitting directly on a desk.
It's not comfortable to poke a semi-vertical touchscreen over a long period of time where you have to support your whole arm while also making precise movements with your fingers.
Fingers are not precise enough to interact with basic elements like text fields and buttons.
I'm sitting here at my desk with its large monitor on an arm, mechanical keyboard and precision mouse and appreciating the years of thought that went into making this setup work. I think there is a possibility of something better with an iPad like device, but Apple would need to be far more ambitious than they've been so far.
Obviously seeing some improvements, but for instance copying 50GB of high precision photos (without potentially mangling them/importing them because it’s a dataset not a bunch of snapshots!) is a terrible experience in iPadOS - and a trivial exercise in every laptop/pc OS out there.
They’ve got a long way to go, unfortunately, especially for enterprise use cases. The hardware really has potential though!
But some things are arbitrary. For example, only allowing one web browser engine is 100% arbitrary (or worse, an abuse of monopoly power).
To be fair I think Apple knows this too, which is why trackpad/mouse support is now a first class feature rather than an accessibility option.
And also probably why they have never released touch Macs.
One will get painfully hot and visibly tick through a large fraction of the battery while not letting you look at anything else or look away from the screen without killing the 10s of minutes long operation while the other just does what you asked, does it quickly, and lets you do other things (on the phone or not) while it's working. And of course if there's something you don't like about the OS you can just change it on the phone. No need for some crazy setup process even to modify system software/configurations.
You might say it's not fair because iSH isn't running natively but it's your only choice on the iPhone.
EDIT: to be clear: even just running git clone on an iPhone in iSH can take upwards of 20 minutes and chew through ~20% of the battery on normal sized repos.
If you had a friend/relative that didn't have much money, and was asking you for advice about which "computer" to get and they can only have one. Would you recommend an ipad? There is no chance I would recommend an ipad in this context.
Jobs liked to describe computers as bicycles for the mind. The ipad is a unicycle for the mind.
For example, there's no notion of rendering a video in the background, organizing project files independent of the application, a plugin ecosystem for creative software, and proper IPC between these apps. So even though the market is different, there's still a lot to be done to come close to desktop editing workflows.
I don't even understand why programmers are always so up in arms about devices like the iPad. Why on earth does one want to program on a handheld touchscreen device anyway? I have zero expectations for that, much like I have zero expectations for the laptop I do program on to be a good drawing device.
"I can't boot an OpenBSD VM on it so it must only be for watching YouTube, for sheeple consumers, not godlike 'creators' like me".
Meanwhile it's plainly great for all kinds of creation-oriented activities, especially where the real-world meets the digital. The sensors are great. Pencil is great. It's a really good companion-tool for all kinds of real-world work, better than a laptop (though actually iPhones often beat both iPads and "real" computers, in that regard, just because of the form factor) Plus it's got some damn good, often-interactive educational apps, some of which work better on a tablet than they would anywhere else. Much the hell better for several of those things than any laptop running a "real OS for Serious Work".
But no, it's just a Netflix console for drooling morons, because you can't easily HAX0R it to replace the lock screen with a port of DOOM, since if you can't do that then it must not be any use for creating things. Give me a break.
My original point was that productivity apps, whether its photo/video/audio editing, word processing, or 3D modeling, all categorically benefit from features like better file management, IPC, background processing, working with external displays, easier keyboard/trackpad navigation, etc...
I saw some things in the presentation around external storage and thunderbolt devices which look like steps in the right direction, but the OS is really not doing it any favors. I would guess that the iPad is successful among this demographic despite iPadOS, not because of it.
Anecdotally, these days my wife (an artist) does digital painting and photo editing exclusively on her iPad Pro because she prefers the software available there combined with the Apple pencil.
So the iPad Pro actually does make sense for color timing and proofs and working in DaVinci Resolve etc? If the display is relevant for this, damn straight giving it a good CPU is going to matter.
People are going to be doing serious video color correction work on these things. I certainly won't… but it's going to start looking very compelling for that audience.
It has a great screen, it's very fast, it has built in 4G and the single tasking nature also makes it my favourite tool for writing (including coding, if I don't have to do UI work as well).
For me, it's definitely a creation device and one of my favourite computers of all time.
It's also infuriating because it could do so much more - but as soon as it starts multi-tasking properly it will lose some of its strengths. Same goes for the magic keyboard - I use it a lot but the utility of it has to be balanced by the fact that it turns it into a laptop, which is something it's not.
I've been a little confused about Apple's product lineup the last decade; does anybody else miss the foursquare grid of consumer/pro and desktop/portable?
Point is, the limitation is software. Even an extremely underpowered niche toy beats the iPad in a common, intuitive task for such a device.
Now, if your goal is "do dev work just the same way I would on a Mac or a Linux machine," then no, the iPad's not going to cut it in its current incarnation, for reasons which one can argue are arbitrary. But honestly, I don't think a PinePhone will really cut it, either. :)
(Digression on arbitrariness: Apple has so far stuck very doggedly to the notion that iPads, like iPhones, should be more like consoles than general purpose computers, and their decisions about the platform mostly make sense if you look at them from that "app console" perspective. That doesn't mean they're the right decisions, but they're definitely conscious decisions. Up until, well, today I was pretty sure Apple was going to keep sticking by this, and that their response to people saying "what about Xcode on the iPad" would be "may we interest you in this Apple Silicon-based Macbook". Putting the M1 CPU in the new iPad Pro under the M1 branding, rather than calling it "A14X" or some such, give me some pause, though.)
SSH via Blink is also not a very good experience (the keyboard is buggy), but it's good enough. The problem is when you want to do some local stuff, e.g., play some multimedia file, or do some expensive computation that your server is too weak to do. Only a fool pays +1000$ for a dumb terminal. (Of course, artists have their apps, and they are the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro.)
But, I'll take gentle issue with
> the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro
I also know or know of writers, photographers, DJs, musicians, and podcasters who do a lot of work on iPads. It was my only portable computer for over a year, and the one I took with me on sometimes long trips. I got real, genuine work done on it, and I am not an artist. I have my complaints with it, to be sure (you might notice I'm using past tense there). But I think the HN audience has a bias toward "ease of use as a development platform" as a primary measure of utility -- which happens to be a measure that the iPad does very poorly on. That's an understandable bias given that audience, but it's worth poking around and seeing what "iPad first" power users are actually doing with their iPads even with the occasionally maddening limitations baked into iPadOS.
OK but you are describing something that 99.8% of iThing owners will never do.
That being said, an executive at my company swears by the iPad Pro and he only ever uses it as a remote desktop device to log into his Citrix Windows environment.
(Ok, there was this one time with a Nokia N900, but it was just a phase =) )
My mum is never going to care about being able to compile a repo from github on her ipad. Neither are 90%+ of the userbase. The developers interested in the platform use a mac.
But yes I would love it if the iPad Pro could just run macOS and i could actually use it as a software development environment, but also run iOS apps. I'd buy that device yesterday
There hasn’t been a moment I lacked computing power or battery life or anything else. The software experience has been lacking.
I was really hoping iPadOS would bring us closer to MacOS. There was even some hope that an M1 iPad would come with MacOS.
I just want to be able to do things without needing an expensive app or a really shitty work around. If it wasn’t for needing the pencil, I’d have stepped away quite some years ago.
The bulk of my use is strictly tablet stuff and I think it is really great at that.
But, for the asking price of the iPad Pro I'd rather get a nice PC laptop with latest gen Ryzen and Nvidia hardware.
Guess I'm just not in the target group for the iPad Pro.
For example I like to noodle on guitar and frankly guitar interface + iPad > laptop.
Likewise for video editing, photo touchups, etc.
I can see iPad for creatives using more processing power
- you need a dongle to plug the interface and the charger together (maybe other interfaces can supply power but mine cannot)
- my interface also behaves as an usb audio device (I suspect all of them do) but iOS does not let you choose audio out through internal speakers or airplay if the usb audio device is present
- some apps don’t support multiple inputs and default to the first input (which on my interface is mic in), GarageBand does not have this problem
Of course this is not a problem for things like digital pianos that just explore midi over Bluetooth.
Even still, the level of finesse they have with Excel and productivity software on a desktop OS was just not replicable on the iPad. It pained me to see my Dad work on his spreadsheets on the old laptop again.
The silver lining to this is at least the iPad is good for watching videos and pretty decent at web browsing. They still use the device casually.
Apple should be trying to empower users with safe abstractions, not lock them down even more.
“Imagine what your computer could do if it was an iPad Pro”.
And in fact, I can currently choose the experience I want if I decide I want a typical multitasking desktop—by putting down the iPad and going over to a Mac (or Linux, or Windows, or FreeBSD machine, or whatever). Or, to extend the "I like a tablet that becomes things, modally" way of thinking about it, by putting the iPad in Remote Desktop mode and connecting over VNC or SSH or RDP to a traditional desktop or server.
I do agree that this is an issue, but I wonder how much of one. I feel like there is quite a bit of inertia behind iOS style "apps" right now that a sizable mass userbase will not use your service if it is a desktop-style interface, because that sort of interface is unfamiliar to them.
Only for very niche apps would you be able to survive on desktop app alone. Many fo those niche uses would be geared towards power-users who are likely more used to a desktop environment.
- The lack of a true development environment local to the device
- The lack of true background app support for things that need persistent connections (ssh clients, etc)
I keep an AWS box spinning that runs docker and my dev env (vim as editor), then connect to this via Blink shell. This lets me port forward via SSH. If I need L2 I then use ZeroTier. My SSH key lives in my local Secure Enclave and then forwards via ssh-agent when needed on the external box (eg pushing commits). Background offloading is avoiding by enabling the geo lock, which also has the bonus of tearing down any SSH connections if the device leaves the lock area. Ends up as a pretty neat setup.
I can certainly agree that Excel on iPad is an awful experience, though. I gave up using my iPad for Excel stuff at work in short order.
Almost all apps obviously take advantage of the keyboard, and 100% of apps where it makes sense. The trackpad can also be used in all apps, although it is true that not all apps are optimised for it yet, but all standard UI elements support it automatically.
Not sure why you'd expect iPad apps to be similar to the desktop variants, it seems that would be pretty pointless no? You might not like the iPad UX, but many people prefer it.
as a developer, not a user. I can’t have two different apps running on different displays, nor can I take advantage of the display’s resolution. In practice, everything is mirrored.
> Almost all apps obviously take advantage of the keyboard
When I say take advantage of the keyboard and mouse, I mean to offer shortcuts/navigation akin to what you’d find on a desktop.
I don’t mean to say that apps should be exactly like desktop apps, but the iPad UX is making it harder to use the current iteration of document/spreadsheet apps.
There are things the iPad does strictly better, of course. But I don’t see these experiences as mutually exclusive.
There are absolutely keyboard shortcuts. Obviously this is up to developers, a lot of apps like Things, Shapr3d etc have excellent shortcut support.
It takes a while to optimise UX in a new interface paradigm, amd again this is obviously up to developers. There are few technical limitations. And considering how little Excel on the PC has changed over the last 20 years, we should be happy. And look at Numbers and Pages on iPad, really good UX.
iPad OS desperately needs a persistent dock or taskbar, like we see on macOS and Windows. The gesture system is too cumbersome to be effective.
The Microsoft Surface Pro is such a great example in contrast, offering a full OS in a tablet form. I had a Pro for about 6 months and I loved that thing, the only problem was the hardware was subpar and failed on me twice so I gave up on it.
An iPad Pro M1 running OS X would be my dream portable machine.
iOS is such a waste on this device. A crippled, mobile OS that barely lets you do any productivity work. Why, Apple, why.
Attempts to get there tend to dumb down and limit the functionality of the mouse+keyboard experience.
I guess the obvious option would be to let Pro users switch an iPad into a 'MacOS mode' with the full desktop interface, mostly relying on an additional keyboard+mouse. But I can't see Apple going for anything like that. They're more likely to push the desktop interface more in the direction of iOS...
If you haven't used a Windows 10 tablet for any amount of time, I'd suggest trying it out. I've used small and large Windows tablets for many years and have yet to find any big complaints about the UX.
Good thing that if you don't like the way Windows 10 looks, you can easily change it. Other than that, functionally, everything just works and I'd challenge you to say what doesn't.
Take Excel for example. Try right-clicking on a cell or dragging down a formula, and you'll see that it only picks it up a fraction of the time, and you have to click multiple times with gesture-like latencies in between to get it to work.