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iPads with Apple’s stylus are amazing tools for illustration, hand-drawing diagrams, sketching out ideas, proofreading PDF files, taking technical notes, doing

iPads with Apple’s stylus are amazing tools for illustration, hand-drawing diagrams, sketching out ideas, proofreading PDF files, taking technical notes, doing mathematical scratch work, and so on. Think of it like a notebook/scrapbook with pens/markers that doesn’t take any consumables, takes up less space in a bag, allows undo/redo, and makes sharing the products digitally a snap. Works best when used alongside a laptop, rather than as a replacement, at least for me. I certainly wouldn’t want to write code on it full time.

xyzzy123 10y ago
Agree, it's wonderful except for thinking clearly about things and clearly expressing them in other terms than a diagram. And in the iPaid view of the world, if you write a responsive comment, only paid subscribers will see it. Because that's "premium content".
- jacobolus 10y ago
  I have no idea what you’re getting at with “iPaid”, “responsive comment”, “only paid subscribers”, etc. Seems like a weird off topic rant that has nothing to do with my comment or the thread in general. For pen input, the iPad (display, stylus/digitizer, software) is better than anything you could buy for 50x the price a decade ago. For me, it’s not as good a general-purpose computer as a 10-year-old laptop, but it’s also not really supposed to be. There’s room in the world for more than one vision of computing to exist side by side.
subspaceman 10y ago
Yep, this is exactly what I do with my Surface - except then I do code on it, which is why I picked it instead of an iPad pro. This one device has replaced my MacBook pro while still letting me sketch and draw and annotate.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  I tried a few versions of Surface, but I found the Apple stylus to have about half the latency (or maybe less), with better precision/accuracy, and the signal processing done by the software I tried to convert pen inputs to strokes/lines seemed more polished/effective. I’m sure there are some customers / use cases where those differences aren’t a deal-breaker. Personally I really appreciate it. I have been very impressed with the iPad pen input. It’s clear their hardware and software engineers collaborated closely to make a really impressive device and experience. (Again, as long as you mainly are using pen input.) It’s possible there’s other software out there that does a better job than Microsoft’s first party stuff or the couple of third-party apps I tried.

xyzzy123 10y ago

Agree, it's wonderful except for thinking clearly about things and clearly expressing them in other terms than a diagram. And in the iPaid view of the world, if you write a responsive comment, only paid subscribers will see it. Because that's "premium content".

jacobolus 10y ago
I have no idea what you’re getting at with “iPaid”, “responsive comment”, “only paid subscribers”, etc. Seems like a weird off topic rant that has nothing to do with my comment or the thread in general. For pen input, the iPad (display, stylus/digitizer, software) is better than anything you could buy for 50x the price a decade ago. For me, it’s not as good a general-purpose computer as a 10-year-old laptop, but it’s also not really supposed to be. There’s room in the world for more than one vision of computing to exist side by side.

subspaceman 10y ago

Yep, this is exactly what I do with my Surface - except then I do code on it, which is why I picked it instead of an iPad pro. This one device has replaced my MacBook pro while still letting me sketch and draw and annotate.

jacobolus 10y ago
I tried a few versions of Surface, but I found the Apple stylus to have about half the latency (or maybe less), with better precision/accuracy, and the signal processing done by the software I tried to convert pen inputs to strokes/lines seemed more polished/effective. I’m sure there are some customers / use cases where those differences aren’t a deal-breaker. Personally I really appreciate it. I have been very impressed with the iPad pen input. It’s clear their hardware and software engineers collaborated closely to make a really impressive device and experience. (Again, as long as you mainly are using pen input.) It’s possible there’s other software out there that does a better job than Microsoft’s first party stuff or the couple of third-party apps I tried.