Bingo. I also have a 2018 11" iPad Pro, and the only things that would even nudge me in the direction of upgrading is a landscape-friendly selfie camera (like the new iPad got), significantly smaller bezels, Touch ID (again, the regular iPad has this), and a better display (11" doesn't have mini-LED).

I was just thinking this myself. I have the 12.9" 2018 iPad Pro and was considering pulling the trigger on this new iPad Pro announced today. But I really have no reason to, my current one runs perfectly and I've even got the floating keyboard case which is backwards compatible with it. It's replaced my laptop entirely, instead I just ssh into my Mac at home and use vim if I feel like writing some code on the road or from bed.

Honestly have no complaints with this 2018 model, it's one of my favorite pieces of hardware I've ever owned and in fact is what introduced me to the Apple ecosystem (where I'm now fully submersed) in the first place.

Very interesting! Can you please share your preferred apps for ssh/remote access to your home server or Mac? I think I could use that recommendation.

Sure! I started off using the Termius app for ssh, but ended up moving to Blink. It's been so long that I can't really say why I stopped using Termius, but Blink works really well. It has a lot of built-in bash commands, but honestly I don't find those that useful since I'm not working on local files. I think if Blink had vim built-in I'd use those commands a lot more, but right now I just open Blink and immediately ssh into my home machine. I have a couple ssh aliases set up for that -- one that uses my local network if I'm at home, and one that connects to my home IP address if I'm out on the road.

The only special setup that I had to do on my Mac was allowing ssh connections and adding the public key that the Blink app created for me. When I was on Windows I found that I had to map the command and option keys from my iPad keyboard to my custom vim keybindings, but now that I use a Mac as well that's not necessary.

Edit: here's a picture of my iPad ssh'd into my Mac and editing some F# code. It works well! https://www.dropbox.com/s/ilh16cesqj8ovi9/IMG_7535.jpeg?dl=0

This looks incredibly good. How's the typing latency & bash completion? Thanks for sharing a photo - gives much richer perspective.

If I'm on my home network the latency is impossible to notice, I might as well be at my Mac. Same goes for bash completion, it works flawlessly. Once I'm off my home network it's a slightly different story, it just depends on the internet connection wherever I happen to be connecting from. For example I stayed at a hotel in Fargo, ND a few weeks ago and the latency was fine for the most part, but there were moments where the typing or completion would lag behind by a second or two and then catch up. Almost like lag in a video game.

Blink has mosh in addition to ssh, which if I understand correctly is much better suited to handling higher latency connections like that. I just haven't taken the time to set it up at home, so I can't really say how it performs.

All in all, if you're curious about using the iPad for this kind of thing I really recommend it. I absolutely love mine. Apple is pretty generous with their return policy too, I've returned a handful of their laptops just because I had buyer's remorse!

Nah, good heavens I won't return it :) I have a workplace M1 11in model, but its late for me - so I am going to try this fun project tomorrow.

But thanks for generously replying with so much detail. Much appreciated.

Another vote for Blink. In particular, its mosh support is brilliant.

Short version: after installing mosh-server on the remote machine, you run "mosh remotehost" instead of "ssh remotehost". It uses SSH to establish an encrypted UDP "connection" to the server. If your IP changes, Blink instantly re-establishes a connection. If you pause your iPad for a week and come back to it, Blink instantly re-establishes a connection.

What this means in practice is that I can start doing something at home. Oops, time to leave: I take my iPad on with me on the bus to the office, pair it with my phone, and continue working from the same session. Get to work and switch to Wi-Fi, and I keep using that same session. It's freaking magical.

mosh + tmux/screen is a wonderful UX. The lack of an escape key is less critical on a command line, where C-c more reliably does the same thing (and if you're using vim, try C-[ or remapping the action to `jj` instead of Esc).

Blink.sh is my favorite ssh app for the iPad.

My favorite so far has been Prompt2, but I'm down to try others!

> in fact is what introduced me to the Apple ecosystem (where I'm now fully submersed) in the first place.

If you’d be willing to expand on this, I’d be very interested to hear more.

I used to be all-in on Apple devices circa 2010, but drifted back to Windows and Android for gaming & better notification UX (and Windows being a much more familiar OS to me). However, I don’t game on PC anymore, and I’ve become increasingly unhappy with the privacy concerns regarding Google’s ecosystem.

I got a 2020 iPad and the UX is leagues ahead of my aging Samsung Galaxy S9. Given this and the aforementioned privacy concerns, I’ve been considering once again switching to an iPhone and MacBook. Therefore, it would be very valuable to me to hear more about your experiences (and others who have made the same switch and happen to read this).

Fun use case:

My 12.9” eventually had like 30 min battery life and I refuse to spend so much on a legit battery replacement.

Instead I mounted it on the side of our refrigerator to be always plugged in.

Our kids use it with friends to look at family pictures, play multiplayer arcade games, stream music, etc.

It became kind of a mini home console for them (it is mounted lower for their height).

It might be a good model for internet browsing as well, and texting, since it forces open communication as they wean into entering the dangerous internet (for some, it can be as dangerous as learning to drive…)

Apple devices last a long time and get software updates for many years. You really don't need to upgrade unless either (A) the new device has features you want, or (B) your current device stops getting software updates.

I assume multicore video encoding makes full use of the CPU?

It seems kind of crazy to say there's nothing that makes full use of the CPU.

Do people ever seriously edit video on the iPad?

Oh my goodness, absolutely.

You're not going to edit a feature film on it, but for anything that's just filming a few minutes of different things and editing then together and posting/sending it wherever, it's a godsend.

Whether you're a professional actor taping a last-minute audition from your hotel room, a sales manager putting together an instructional video on site, or a high schooler putting together a classroom project.

Huh. I had completely written off that use-case because literally any time I've wanted to do anything at all, I've found that whatever movie editing software I'm trying at the time can't do it. So instead of wasting time by trying to edit on iOS, regardless of how simple what I want to do is, I always just copy it to my laptop or desktop and do the editing with real software on a real computer.

But maybe there exists better options. I can't say I have invested in expensive video editing software on iOS. (Not that I've ever had to on macOS or Linux though.)

I didn't think the camera was good enough on ipads for decent video, but turn your back for six years and look what happens.

I used to.

For about 6 months iMovie had this crazy bug on my iPad pro that made it extremely laggy.

The software side of iOS is definitely suffering lately, and somethings on the ipad have felt like a downgrade.

I own a 2018 11" and an M1 12.9" and there's plenty of times the 11" has failed to cope with something the 12.9" barely breaks a sweat over. I'm not sure what you do with yours, but it's provably untrue that there is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.

What app are you using that runs poorly on the 11”?

Cubasis / NanoStudio / AUM / AudioBus etc. Anything you can host multiple AUv3 instruments and FX in. The M1 handles many, many more AUs - depending on which ones, probably twice as many or more.

You’re right that the 2018 iPads are great. But people buying their first powerful ipad really don’t want a 2018 machine so Apple keeps improving them. Software improves as time goes on.

Serious question, would you recommend buying a refurb 2018 for modest usage over the new iPad 10.9"? It's about 100nits brighter, a bit lighter with a bit larger screen and supports pencil 2. Looks like they are about the same price as well.

I would, certainly. I'm also using a 2018 Pro. The additional screen size makes more difference to me than brightness; I never have the brightness all the way up anyway.

If you can get a good deal on one, absolutely.

Despite its age, the 2018 iPads still fare very well for most tasks.

What do you use for note taking on an iPad?

I use both Notability and GoodNotes.

>After buying it, I haven't printed a single sheet of paper for note-taking.

OTOH you can buy a whole lot of $3 spiral notebooks for the price of an ipad pro

It depends on what you're planning to do with these notes.

For me notebooks go straight to paper recycling after a while, the space and burden is just too much. Anything I intend to last any devent amount of time is digitized, and scanning notebooks is a PITA.

Sure. But I also am in university, where notes are distributed as PDFs, and I have e-books also as PDFs. It's much easier to annotate directly on a PDF than to have to print them, annotate, scan, and ensure the scan quality is good.

At some point, 'it's cheaper' is just not a good enough argument for paper notebooks versus the sheer versatility of an iPad.

I would have to buy a veritable cart-load of writing stationery to emulate everything I do on my iPad. It would likely still be cheaper, yes, but it would also be much more of a pain in the neck.

Except at some point those books end up in some storage box in the basement, or potentially tossed out. Digital notes are forever with iCloud/Dropbox/etc and can be searched anytime.

That’s because apple hasn’t introduced any major new features to the ipad pro hardware since then. A 4 year old iphone is also just as future-proof but it doesn’t feel like that since they’ve added many new features to later models.

That's where I'm at - I keep an eye on new releases because I'm a nerd and I like toys. But realistically I'm not going to shell out for them at least until this one stops getting OS updates.

I don't work-work on it, but it does sit beside me all day. Notes, manuals, calls, music etc. Sharing my screen, pulling up a diagram and the pencil is my favourite way to explain things on calls lately. Then I can just shoot them a pdf when we're done to cut out 'n keep.

I see nothing today that changes this for me - just new toys that I look forward to seeing in a few years.

Video games are more enjoyable with the increased processing power!

Where the 2018 model struggles at high frame rates, the M1 version enables more fluid gameplay at 95-120fps. The new M2 would likely deliver more consistent 120fps performance given the advertised 15% CPU and 35% GPU uplift.

Hey, they tried really hard with Stage Manager running so poorly it required an M1 iPad in order to run.

They've since walked that back, and while it is being reworked will be coming to a14 models after all, probably sans the external display support.

> There is not a single app that makes full use of the increased CPU power of these new iPads.

Nomad Sculpt. There is no such thing as increased CPU power, often you're dealing with multiple millions of polygons. There is even limitation in the app saying "don't go over X number of polygons" because of CPU limitations. And it's the reason why I'm buying new iPad Pro - to be able to work with more polygons faster.

I (almost) exclusively used “the new iPad” for all my studying and note taking a decade ago. Notability was my go-to app, and I used the touchscreen exclusively. It was a wonderful setup.