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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

The endless struggle of professional iPad users trying to get their hardware to act like something it insists it is not.

Ultimately the team behind it doesn't want to relinquish control to the user, so we're stuck in this world where it can never truly by a professional tool because every step of the way there is something like this where on a real computer its just an extra screen and you put on what you want on it and the situation where content of the other screen gets suddenly shown can't happen. But the iPad has to pretend screens don't exist and only apps do.

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When the iPad launched, I was in my third year of an industrial design program and we endlessly mocked it. Who was this thing for? It's a giant iPhone. It's not a laptop or a phone, why would anyone want it? Obviously, by the end of my last year we realized we were definitely wrong.

These days I still think we were wrong, but I also think we were more right than we knew at the time.

It's frustrating for professionals, and it's too big for kids to be carrying around, but after observing my parents I realize who it's for: people who have trouble reading on small screens. That's why I like my iPad.

> professional iPad users

No such an animal. I have recently been issued an iPad for logging jobs and material use, it's terrible. Tablets are essentially little TVs made for consuming images and video with minimal user interaction, when you have to start typing up a dozen lengthy descriptions of jobs on a touch screen it gets frustrating in a hurry. Most of the contractors that come buy have been been given iPads as well and are equally impressed with the experience.

Sure but here we are talking about Airplay, not about a monitor directly connected to the iPad (which also can be done)

Great, just need to make sure I have a dongle and a 10' HDMI cable in my iPad bag.

Why would you need a dongle? I never understood this complaint. If you need a dongle you just bought the wrong cable. Instead of a dongle and an HDMI-to-HDMI cable, you could just have gotten a USB-C to HDMI cable.

Same goes for basically every other scenario where people complain about needing dongles.

Sometimes you're given an HDMI cable to plug into your device, like in an office meeting room. Or in the article's case, a classroom.

Because you want to recharge your ipad ? never heard of it ?

Because I own a number of USB C dongles and a number of HDMI cables, both of which are extremely common, but zero USB C to HDMI cables, which I'm assuming I could easily find on Aliexpress but have never actually seen before in my life.

Airplay can just extend the screen as a second monitor on MacOS

This might be true but also ipadOS is a buggy mess and fails to even be a good walled garden

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