Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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I've got both the Surface Pro and an iPad Pro 10.5. They excel at different things but that is to be expected, they are converging on something else and that was unexpected. When I travel I bring both.

I am a heavy user of Cellular connectivity with my iPad Pro. It is my go to device on the road and while travelling, open it up and it just works. It runs a long time on a charge and it has apps that respond quickly for movies, reading, browsing, mapping, and note taking (all things I do while traveling).

The Surface Pro is where I do development (generally in WSL2 these days) once I've arrived somewhere that there is free WiFi and access to AC power. I will typically use it with a USB device or two as well (such as flash drives, wireless connections, and embedded development boards) Its ability to drive a couple of 2K screens and give me a "full up" developer experience is appreciated.

I sketch more on my iPad even though I like the drawing "feel" of the Surface Pro better. The SP feels "clunky" when I try to use it in tablet mode.

When I use them together its generally the iPad for reference materials and background music while I'm writing code on the SP.

When I go to a place where people are working--an office, a university library, a coffee shop--I see a sea of laptops and no iPads. Even in places such as Stanford libraries, where it is a sea of MacBooks, the people who provably buy lots of expensive Apple products don't buy iPads for work.

And iPads have been outselling Macs on a unit basis for a decade, so even people who buy iPads don't seem to find them suitable for general office/school-type work (as opposed to use as specialty terminals carried by inspectors or mounted on fast food counters).

Some combination of form factor and iOS's "you'll only hurt yourself with tools, so we've replaced them with lots of fun ways to buy entertainment" design ethos has so far failed to make iPad the computer replacement that Apple always claims it is. Instead, it's more of a personal entertainment center.

The iPad is useful for certain things. If you're trying to share a document with another person and discuss it, it works much better on an iPad. Both people can hold it, scroll it, etc and it feels much less awkward than discussing things on a laptop.

It's also a bit better than a laptop for digging in and highlighting reading material.

I would not use it as my main PC, though, that's for sure. The apps just aren't there yet.

I really don't think it's that "apps aren't there yet". The platform is more than a decade old and has an order of magnitude more apps and app development than the Mac ever had. I really think that the reason people who own Macs and iPads keep ignoring their iPads when planning to do real work is not that there hasn't been enough effort yet put into creating apps for iOS. It's that the form factor and OS were designed together for one-finger selection from a portable menu of amusements, not for plugging in a standard thumb drive and flexibly deploying a combination of ordinary work tools on a project folder full of productive work.

There is also a lack of desktop OS features. I tried using my image management software, Mylio, and I had to keep the iPad pro on and unlocked for images to sync to the cloud, and it did it a lot slower than my 6 year old macbook pro. Same with SD card imports and other general multitasking tasks.

Web browsing on the ipad pro with a keyboard cover although is pretty good!

My Surface works perfect for this. I just take the keyboard off and it's a tablet, with a lovely pen you can use to highlight.

The biggest problem is third-party software support. iPads are great right now for a lot of creative work, and in theory capable of a lot more in their current incarnation, but if you can only afford one computer and you know e.g. your history course next semester is going to force you to install IE6 and log in to some crusty web thing that relies on popups and embedded ActiveX controls (exaggerating, but you get the point), what are you going to buy? It's not really a choice at all, when you think about it.

Techy use cases like building and running "custom" code are unsupported on a more fundamental level, but I'd call that a special case. Slightly more concerning is how tightly locked-down the app store is.

I've recently acquired a used Surface Pro 5 with Cellular connectivity as a replacement for my old iPad (many apps don't work yet on the newer Surface Pro X, the successor with Cellular connectivity to Surface Pro 5). I take it with me everywhere nowadays and I'm very happy with it.

I agree that Tablet Mode in Windows isn't as good as iOS on iPad. On the other hand, I just want to carry with me one mobile computer/tablet, not two.

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