Every time I sit down with Jeff to do something on his iPad, I am reminded at how the iPad excels at some things (sketching, reading) and is kind of dreadfully bad at others, especially if you don’t have some kind of pointing device other than your finger.
All of these can be a nightmare of fiddly misses, accidental taps and wasted time:
- Selecting text
- Positioning the cursor
- Moving files
- Flipping between apps and watching as they have to reload everything
- Using “sharing” for the most basic functionality
- Did I mention selecting text?
If you add a keyboard and mouse or trackpad, some of this is mitigated, but it still never feels as smooth to me as on a desktop computer or laptop. In a way, I think Apple would have been better off just making a Mac tablet–looks and feels like an iPad, but functions like an actual Mac. Sort of like what Microsoft did with the Surface (Pro), but better. The iPad, even 13 years after its introduction, still feels hamstrung by the design decisions made leading up to its introduction in 2010, and further back still to when the iPhone was being created in 2006.
Everything we worked on tonight would have been a lot easier on a laptop–even a Windows PC. In fact, since we were using OneDrive, it would have been better on a Windows PC than even a MacBook, which gets second-rate OneDrive support.
Oh well. I just wanted to vent a wee bit tonight, so here we are!
