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I already had an iPad Pro + smart keyboard + pencil once... and got rid of it and switched to a Surface Pro. We still have an old 10" iPad 2 + an older iPad Mi

I already had an iPad Pro + smart keyboard + pencil once... and got rid of it and switched to a Surface Pro. We still have an old 10" iPad 2 + an older iPad Mini in the house and they get use for typical iPad consumer stuff. When I add up this new iPad in the minimum 128GB/Wifi/11" config this one is about $400 more than I paid for the Surface Pro + KB cover + MS Pen. (Which is i5/8GB/128GB/Wifi-only) The Surface has been so much more useful due to it's "real" software ecosystem and ability to just plug devices & memory cards right into it. 4 years on it seems like this new iPad Pro is no better except for even slicker hardware + touchpad. Not there for me till they fix the software and make it a lot easier to do real world tasks that require working with files on other pieces of hardware you have local. Some of the use cases like traveling and doing photography or video on the road have just been so much easier with the Surface Pro. Even just doing things like downloading a spreadsheet from the bank. Maybe you can do that now but you couldn't when I had my iPad Pro. Safari wouldn't let you download a file and open it in the app of your choice. So even though Numbers (or Excel) would have been fine to do finances there was no way to get the files. If the bank had made it so the app could generate a spreadsheet and then let you share it with Numbers that would work, but those use cases never got enabled, and there were so many cases like that.

wlesieutre 7y ago
It does support files on external storage devices now with the USB-C port. It also supports SMB shares, which is great since I keep most of my stuff on a NAS and can access it over my VPN. Developer tools are an obvious weak point, but FWIW I sold my Surface to buy an iPad Pro a few years ago and I'm happier with this. Considering an upgrade from 2016 model (9.7" with lightning) to the new ones. It wouldn't work as my only computer, but I have a much beefier desktop for gaming and whatever workloads the iPad isn't suited for. That list of workloads is getting smaller and smaller though.
- ben7799 7y ago
  Yah.. USB-C, so I carry a dongle with the iPad Pro that I don't have to carry with my Surface Pro. I wouldn't have to buy the dongle cause I already have a great collection of them because I have a USB-C-only MacBook Pro. But I still have bought 0 actual devices that have USB-C. And it's not just external storage devices. It was always such a mess. E.x. with the Camera connection kit on the iPad Pro: - My Canon 5D worked - Go Pro cameras did not work - My external card readers didn't work (which could take the cards from the GoPro), sounds like maybe they fixed this I could go on and on, Apple chips away a little by little at what works and what doesn't work. But meanwhile life goes on with OSX and Windows where everything just works. I used the iPad Pro for 2-3 years.. stuff just improves glacially on the iPad, that's the issue, they fix like one or two things in a year and you still have a list of 25 things that are a PITA. Some of this stuff with USB-C is tough. There's no way I'm going to buy a new $3000+ camera to get USB-C for example.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    I haven't tried since I don't have a USB-C iPad yet, but I would expect that if they mount as a standard FAT filesystem that you should be able to just plug it in and copy the files. You wouldn't need a new camera, just an $8 cable like this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UUBS0SS https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UUBS0SS Or if you want to use a card reader, you get one that plugs into a USB-C port and toss it in the bag with the iPad, just like you would with a USB-A card reader and a Surface. I don't know about the GoPro since I don't have one, but if it's a normal filesystem they ought to show up in the Files app as well. Since you already have a USB-C MacBook Pro in sounds like either the cable or the reader would work on both devices. EDIT: slightly outdated from iPadOS Beta 5, but this blog reports that the Files app shows RAW files and can preview them, but doesn't generate thumbnail icons. Not sure whether this is still the case https://numericcitizen.me/2019/08/01/browsing-raw-images-in-ipados-13-beta-5/ https://numericcitizen.me/2019/08/01/browsing-raw-images-in-...
    - JadeNB 7y ago
      > I haven't tried since I don't have a USB-C iPad yet, but I would expect that if they mount as a standard FAT filesystem that you should be able to just plug it in and copy the files. Does the iPad not support HFS+ and Apple File System?
      - wlesieutre 7y ago
        It does, I mentioned FAT because that's probably what a camera's memory card uses. It's pretty similar to Mac; I believe the supported systems are HFS+, APFS, FAT, and exFAT. But NTFS is not supported at all (macOS can read but not write) and encrypted drives aren't supported (macOS supports read/write).
  - lostapathy 7y ago
    The camera connection kit is a quirky weird stepchild for Apple. It works well with about anything on the iPhone - although some devices require a powered lightning cable. On iPad, the same devices will all work, but it's a lot fussier about what powered lightning cable you use. For example - I have a USB-C to lightning cable and a USB-PD charger. If I use those with the camera connection kit, my iPhone will access any USB storage device I've connected. It won't work on the iPad. But if use a USB-A to lightning cable to a 2 amp power supply, the same devices work fine on the ipad. go figure.
super_mario 7y ago
Exactly. Good hardware, running idiotic crippled operating system, just because someone at Apple wants file system concept to be hard.
millzlane 7y ago
Until you can run MacOS on it, it will always pale in comparison to a Surface pro. You can do some things well on a iPad pro. But you can do anything on a Surface pro except run MacOS. Well I looked and it looks like some have installed MacOS or used vmware images.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  > Until you can run MacOS on it Do we think we'll see full blown MacOS/equivalent on iPads in the next 2-3 years?
  - mvid 7y ago
    It seems more like they are pulling macOS and iOS together, so we will probably see some hybrid of both on both devices. Hopefully better than the Windows implementation though
  - apozem 7y ago
    They don't want the legacy UI and code of macOS, they want iPadOS to be good enough that you don't need a Mac. Hence why the last couple years of iPadOS have been covering more and more use cases. As a frontend web developer, I would love for them to cover my use case. A native terminal and desktop browser tools in iPadOS would get me to ditch my MacBook Pro in a heartbeat.
    - philsnow 7y ago
      Feels a lot like ChromeOS: declare bankruptcy on a lot of the userspace cruft that's accumulated over the decades
- pwthornton 7y ago
  This would ruin the iPad. MacOS is a great windowing OS. It’s not made for touchscreens. MS has been doing this weird dance where they tried to smoosh two OSes together and created one bad OS. The absolute worst was when Windows 8 first came out, and I keep accidentally getting into tablet mode on my non-touch screen laptop. Apple is taking the correct course which is to build a new OS from the ground up and adding power. MS made gigantic missteps by trying to force a windowing OS to support touch. Both are somewhat meeting in the middle, and now Surfaces have gotten pretty decent, but they started out bad. The other thing to remember is that people buy tablets for touch, and Surface Pros are pretty decent laptop replacements but still so-so as an actual tablet.
fumar 7y ago
I had the first five generations of Surface Pros. I agree that they can be your main computer. They have compromises but overall they work fine. For example, they don't have the computational power as the top end MacBook Pros but they are extremely portable and have a touch screen. I eventually went back to MacOS for work. My Macbook Pro is a great companion to my iPad Pro. I use both 50/50 depending on the scenario. For travel, I can leave the Macbook and access it if I need to via Jump on the iPad. Otherwise, everything is in the cloud either Apple's or Google's and the iPad works just fine. The major win for the iPad is battery life and note taking abilities in meetings. The new iPad keyboard with trackpad is a no brainer upgrade for me. Also, Sidecar works amazingly well. I have found myself using the iPad as a second monitor more and more often. It is seamless and hasn't crashed yet. I recently took both Macbook and iPad on a trip and was loving the second screen. And for Logic Pro X, the iPad can act as a remote to control instruments or settings with indiscernible latency.
- geniium 7y ago
  Your comment almost sounds like an Apple ad ;)
  - fumar 7y ago
    Well for the record, I enjoyed my Surfaces. I thought they were what Apple should have released at that time. I am also a fan of ThinkPads. I still have an X1 Carbon – great keyboard. Sold my X230 on a whim and still miss that little guy.
- Descon 7y ago
  Can you run xcode on iPad?
  - fumar 7y ago
    Nope. I use Juno for Jupyter notebooks.
  - geniium 7y ago
    Am waiting on that too!
vlunkr 7y ago
This is why I don't understand how there's even a market for the iPad Pro (outside the Apple superfans). I like iOS, but it seems like if you want to any real work it's an uphill battle, and for the money there are plenty of alternatives.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > if you want to any real work Here we go again with this 'real work' nonsense. What counts as 'real work' to you? A friend of a mine is a barrister and uses an iPad pro to take and use notes. He's definitely doing 'real work' just fine on his iPad.
  - blihp 7y ago
    It's not nonsense, it's just different use cases. For office productivity applications, of course the majority of users will be just fine. For many technical people, 'real' work tends to mean heavy compute and/or I/O workloads which most laptops don't do well with let alone mobile devices.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      Yes everyone has different use cases - so why do we denigrate some people's use cases as not 'real work'?
      - blihp 7y ago
        I think this is mainly a historical thing with Apple's product naming. Their 'pro' designation doesn't mean what it used to mean and so a lot of the denigration is probably more targeting Apple than their users.
    - rapind 7y ago
      A proper shell I can ssh with is really all I would need to do my real programming tasks. So even technical work could be broken down further. I wouldn't use an iPad for this though. The shell's are all a compromise and I'm waiting for a great e-ink display so I can remote from a park / beach / patio.
benayatei 7y ago
I love these two devices but really I don't know which one use Suitable for my job. Are you sure really Surface Pro is better?
- egypturnash 7y ago
  The iPad only runs tablet apps, the Surface runs anything that works on Windows 10. I came real close to ditching my Mac + Wacom combo for a Surface + external keyboard for my art work a couple years ago, but there was a constant lag problem somewhere between my stylus motions and Illustrator that made it unusable, even after a month of regular attempts to find the one magic setting somewhere deep in the ten different control panels related to Windows' stylus drivers.
  - benayatei 7y ago
    Thanks
roenxi 7y ago
I remember observing when the iPad first came out one of its big selling points was is was a few hundred dollars cheaper than everyone expected and it kneecapped the competition who all had offerings in the pipeline that were sorta similar, not Apple and cost more. How times change.
- p1necone 7y ago
  Apple got popular by being good, now they're popular they don't have to be good any more. It's the same story as all (hyperbole) big brands.
- rchaud 7y ago
  I remember the pricing being a surprise, but the Android tablets that followed all came in at lower prices. Only the Blackberry Playbook and HP Touchpad (running already-obsolete OSes) tried to match Apple's pricing. Both were discontinued after terrible sales numbers. Google botched Android 3.0 (the first "Tablet" version of Android), and developers mostly didn't bother trying to adapt their apps for tablet screens. If it hadn't been for Samsung pushing the boundaries with pressure-sensitive screens, pen input (2014 Galaxy Tab pro line), Linux on DeX, and SoC improvements, there wouldn't be an Android tablet market beyond the disposable 7" tabs people buy for their kids.
saagarjha 7y ago
> Maybe you can do that now but you couldn't when I had my iPad Pro. You can do that now.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
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.
- SiVal 7y ago
  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.
  - D13Fd 7y ago
    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.
Slippery_John 7y ago
The surface pro can do everything, but for most things the tablet mode experience is somewhere between dismal and unusable. The ipad pro can't do a handful of tasks, but for everything else the experience is excellent in both tablet and laptop mode. Those things the ipad can't do are largely niche (now that working with files is well supported), and are solvable limitations. The software problem on the surface pro is pervasive and unsolvable. They've done their best, but you can't make every piece of software written for Windows suddenly not require the precision of a mouse or suddenly support navigational gestures. I had a surface book 2, but got rid of it in favor of an ipad pro after using one for a while. I have a desktop that I use for gaming, but I would have that either way for the sheer power of it. The only thing that the ipad can't do well that I'd use it for is programming. This is not a dealbreaker for me, as I don't like programming on the go anyway, and if I really needed to then I can remote into a desktop to do it.
- deegles 7y ago
  > Those things the ipad can't do are largely niche Software development doesn't feel niche to me. It feels like it should be possible to publish a usable, high quality iPad app using nothing but an iPad.
  - dhosek 7y ago
    When you're in the niche, it's hard to see out. I'm old enough to remember encountering the first computer magazine that didn't feature program listings (SoftTalk) and thinking who would want this thing? Programming is very much a niche activity (although I imagine that it's more a question of when rather than if that we'll see some sort of XCode for iOS).
    - ryukafalz 7y ago
      My take on this is that programming may be niche now, but it shouldn't be. Simple scripting is useful and lets you easily perform tasks that would otherwise be repetitive. I'm not saying everyone should be able to build a large application, but you shouldn't be stopped from building things on it, otherwise how will you even get started? Computers that stop you from inspecting them and learning how they work build a moat between the users and developers of the system. That's the opposite of what I think we should be encouraging.
gumby 7y ago
I will definitely get this new iPad Pro (have been waiting for this configuration) but this doesn't contradict your point as, for example, I don't intend to plug much of anything into it. Perhaps an HDMI adaptor or ethernet dongle, both of which I already have for my MB. By the sounds of the usual complaints my use case is quite uncommon (really I need a fast, multithreaded easy-for-demos device for a specific code base the engine of which runs on Linux/MacOS/iOS). It seems Apple is selling a boatload of iPads so they seem to think that few people want to plug things in. That seems absurd when I talk to my friends, but, well, I'm sure the usage data they get from people (like me) who enable that is telling them otherwise. As for the Surface: I've seen a couple and the hardware looks quite nice but in terms of weight and usability the MBA has been just fine. I often find myself using my current iPad to do something and then put it down and switch to the laptop. The use cases seem disjoint, partially due to the inherent limitations of each platform vs the other in certain regards, so over the years I've given up on thinking that a unified device would be worth it. I notice people have commented that some of your objections to the iPad have subsequently been rectified, but the core issues IMHO still remain. Another way to put it is that you now can do many laptop-like things on the iPad but it would hardly be your first choice, especially when it's so easy to switch to another device more adapted to things like filesystem manipulation. But if it's the only device you happen to have on your person you aren't stuck. Maybe Surface can find a way over that hump.
GoofballJones 7y ago
Ok. That's been the opposite experience of me. I got rid of the Surface Pro because it's a kludge. No matter how long Microsoft worked on touch/pen support to slap onto Windows, it still fails in being a good environment, at least for me. Plus, at the time, the battery life was abysmal. I'm not sure if they ever got better at that with the newer models. AND, no matter how much they played up that fricken kickstand, it was terrible in trying to use it on my lap. But then again, the iPad was the same. Enter the iPad, which was built from the ground up as a touch interface. but now it looks like they're coming at it from a different directly....a touch interface incorporating mouse/touchpad support. But, I'm for people using what they want to use. My use/need isn't the same.
- Apofis 7y ago
  The thing was absolutely terrible, I hated mine. It was extremely clumsy and unusable. We'll see about this new iPad Pro though, really excited about the trackpad support.
S_A_P 7y ago
For me the iPad is best for music and that sort of creative segment. It handles touch better than windows imo, and the os handles low latency applications much better. Core Audio is really just an exceptional framework for audio.
m3kw9 7y ago
You got the wrong computing device when you got your iPad, should have got a macbook
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
Microsoft and Apple diverged down two evolutionary paths. At release the Surface seemed ridiculous, adding touch and pen tools to a normal computer. Apple went the other way starting from scratch, touch only seemed the sensible choice. Now year on year as Apple adds more and more laptop computer into the iPad and it's Mac line lacks any modern input flexibility it's starting to look absurd they went down this route and the Surface line is making more and more sense the further we go down this road.

wlesieutre 7y ago

It does support files on external storage devices now with the USB-C port. It also supports SMB shares, which is great since I keep most of my stuff on a NAS and can access it over my VPN. Developer tools are an obvious weak point, but FWIW I sold my Surface to buy an iPad Pro a few years ago and I'm happier with this. Considering an upgrade from 2016 model (9.7" with lightning) to the new ones. It wouldn't work as my only computer, but I have a much beefier desktop for gaming and whatever workloads the iPad isn't suited for. That list of workloads is getting smaller and smaller though.

ben7799 7y ago
Yah.. USB-C, so I carry a dongle with the iPad Pro that I don't have to carry with my Surface Pro. I wouldn't have to buy the dongle cause I already have a great collection of them because I have a USB-C-only MacBook Pro. But I still have bought 0 actual devices that have USB-C. And it's not just external storage devices. It was always such a mess. E.x. with the Camera connection kit on the iPad Pro: - My Canon 5D worked - Go Pro cameras did not work - My external card readers didn't work (which could take the cards from the GoPro), sounds like maybe they fixed this I could go on and on, Apple chips away a little by little at what works and what doesn't work. But meanwhile life goes on with OSX and Windows where everything just works. I used the iPad Pro for 2-3 years.. stuff just improves glacially on the iPad, that's the issue, they fix like one or two things in a year and you still have a list of 25 things that are a PITA. Some of this stuff with USB-C is tough. There's no way I'm going to buy a new $3000+ camera to get USB-C for example.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  I haven't tried since I don't have a USB-C iPad yet, but I would expect that if they mount as a standard FAT filesystem that you should be able to just plug it in and copy the files. You wouldn't need a new camera, just an $8 cable like this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UUBS0SS https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UUBS0SS Or if you want to use a card reader, you get one that plugs into a USB-C port and toss it in the bag with the iPad, just like you would with a USB-A card reader and a Surface. I don't know about the GoPro since I don't have one, but if it's a normal filesystem they ought to show up in the Files app as well. Since you already have a USB-C MacBook Pro in sounds like either the cable or the reader would work on both devices. EDIT: slightly outdated from iPadOS Beta 5, but this blog reports that the Files app shows RAW files and can preview them, but doesn't generate thumbnail icons. Not sure whether this is still the case https://numericcitizen.me/2019/08/01/browsing-raw-images-in-ipados-13-beta-5/ https://numericcitizen.me/2019/08/01/browsing-raw-images-in-...
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    > I haven't tried since I don't have a USB-C iPad yet, but I would expect that if they mount as a standard FAT filesystem that you should be able to just plug it in and copy the files. Does the iPad not support HFS+ and Apple File System?
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      It does, I mentioned FAT because that's probably what a camera's memory card uses. It's pretty similar to Mac; I believe the supported systems are HFS+, APFS, FAT, and exFAT. But NTFS is not supported at all (macOS can read but not write) and encrypted drives aren't supported (macOS supports read/write).
- lostapathy 7y ago
  The camera connection kit is a quirky weird stepchild for Apple. It works well with about anything on the iPhone - although some devices require a powered lightning cable. On iPad, the same devices will all work, but it's a lot fussier about what powered lightning cable you use. For example - I have a USB-C to lightning cable and a USB-PD charger. If I use those with the camera connection kit, my iPhone will access any USB storage device I've connected. It won't work on the iPad. But if use a USB-A to lightning cable to a 2 amp power supply, the same devices work fine on the ipad. go figure.

super_mario 7y ago

Exactly. Good hardware, running idiotic crippled operating system, just because someone at Apple wants file system concept to be hard.

millzlane 7y ago

Until you can run MacOS on it, it will always pale in comparison to a Surface pro. You can do some things well on a iPad pro. But you can do anything on a Surface pro except run MacOS. Well I looked and it looks like some have installed MacOS or used vmware images.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> Until you can run MacOS on it Do we think we'll see full blown MacOS/equivalent on iPads in the next 2-3 years?
- mvid 7y ago
  It seems more like they are pulling macOS and iOS together, so we will probably see some hybrid of both on both devices. Hopefully better than the Windows implementation though
- apozem 7y ago
  They don't want the legacy UI and code of macOS, they want iPadOS to be good enough that you don't need a Mac. Hence why the last couple years of iPadOS have been covering more and more use cases. As a frontend web developer, I would love for them to cover my use case. A native terminal and desktop browser tools in iPadOS would get me to ditch my MacBook Pro in a heartbeat.
  - philsnow 7y ago
    Feels a lot like ChromeOS: declare bankruptcy on a lot of the userspace cruft that's accumulated over the decades
pwthornton 7y ago
This would ruin the iPad. MacOS is a great windowing OS. It’s not made for touchscreens. MS has been doing this weird dance where they tried to smoosh two OSes together and created one bad OS. The absolute worst was when Windows 8 first came out, and I keep accidentally getting into tablet mode on my non-touch screen laptop. Apple is taking the correct course which is to build a new OS from the ground up and adding power. MS made gigantic missteps by trying to force a windowing OS to support touch. Both are somewhat meeting in the middle, and now Surfaces have gotten pretty decent, but they started out bad. The other thing to remember is that people buy tablets for touch, and Surface Pros are pretty decent laptop replacements but still so-so as an actual tablet.

fumar 7y ago

I had the first five generations of Surface Pros. I agree that they can be your main computer. They have compromises but overall they work fine. For example, they don't have the computational power as the top end MacBook Pros but they are extremely portable and have a touch screen. I eventually went back to MacOS for work. My Macbook Pro is a great companion to my iPad Pro. I use both 50/50 depending on the scenario. For travel, I can leave the Macbook and access it if I need to via Jump on the iPad. Otherwise, everything is in the cloud either Apple's or Google's and the iPad works just fine. The major win for the iPad is battery life and note taking abilities in meetings. The new iPad keyboard with trackpad is a no brainer upgrade for me. Also, Sidecar works amazingly well. I have found myself using the iPad as a second monitor more and more often. It is seamless and hasn't crashed yet. I recently took both Macbook and iPad on a trip and was loving the second screen. And for Logic Pro X, the iPad can act as a remote to control instruments or settings with indiscernible latency.

geniium 7y ago
Your comment almost sounds like an Apple ad ;)
- fumar 7y ago
  Well for the record, I enjoyed my Surfaces. I thought they were what Apple should have released at that time. I am also a fan of ThinkPads. I still have an X1 Carbon – great keyboard. Sold my X230 on a whim and still miss that little guy.
Descon 7y ago
Can you run xcode on iPad?
- fumar 7y ago
  Nope. I use Juno for Jupyter notebooks.
- geniium 7y ago
  Am waiting on that too!

vlunkr 7y ago

This is why I don't understand how there's even a market for the iPad Pro (outside the Apple superfans). I like iOS, but it seems like if you want to any real work it's an uphill battle, and for the money there are plenty of alternatives.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> if you want to any real work Here we go again with this 'real work' nonsense. What counts as 'real work' to you? A friend of a mine is a barrister and uses an iPad pro to take and use notes. He's definitely doing 'real work' just fine on his iPad.
- blihp 7y ago
  It's not nonsense, it's just different use cases. For office productivity applications, of course the majority of users will be just fine. For many technical people, 'real' work tends to mean heavy compute and/or I/O workloads which most laptops don't do well with let alone mobile devices.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Yes everyone has different use cases - so why do we denigrate some people's use cases as not 'real work'?
    - blihp 7y ago
      I think this is mainly a historical thing with Apple's product naming. Their 'pro' designation doesn't mean what it used to mean and so a lot of the denigration is probably more targeting Apple than their users.
  - rapind 7y ago
    A proper shell I can ssh with is really all I would need to do my real programming tasks. So even technical work could be broken down further. I wouldn't use an iPad for this though. The shell's are all a compromise and I'm waiting for a great e-ink display so I can remote from a park / beach / patio.

benayatei 7y ago

I love these two devices but really I don't know which one use Suitable for my job. Are you sure really Surface Pro is better?

egypturnash 7y ago
The iPad only runs tablet apps, the Surface runs anything that works on Windows 10. I came real close to ditching my Mac + Wacom combo for a Surface + external keyboard for my art work a couple years ago, but there was a constant lag problem somewhere between my stylus motions and Illustrator that made it unusable, even after a month of regular attempts to find the one magic setting somewhere deep in the ten different control panels related to Windows' stylus drivers.
- benayatei 7y ago
  Thanks

roenxi 7y ago

I remember observing when the iPad first came out one of its big selling points was is was a few hundred dollars cheaper than everyone expected and it kneecapped the competition who all had offerings in the pipeline that were sorta similar, not Apple and cost more. How times change.

p1necone 7y ago
Apple got popular by being good, now they're popular they don't have to be good any more. It's the same story as all (hyperbole) big brands.
rchaud 7y ago
I remember the pricing being a surprise, but the Android tablets that followed all came in at lower prices. Only the Blackberry Playbook and HP Touchpad (running already-obsolete OSes) tried to match Apple's pricing. Both were discontinued after terrible sales numbers. Google botched Android 3.0 (the first "Tablet" version of Android), and developers mostly didn't bother trying to adapt their apps for tablet screens. If it hadn't been for Samsung pushing the boundaries with pressure-sensitive screens, pen input (2014 Galaxy Tab pro line), Linux on DeX, and SoC improvements, there wouldn't be an Android tablet market beyond the disposable 7" tabs people buy for their kids.

saagarjha 7y ago

> Maybe you can do that now but you couldn't when I had my iPad Pro. You can do that now.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

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.

SiVal 7y ago
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.
- D13Fd 7y ago
  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.

Slippery_John 7y ago

The surface pro can do everything, but for most things the tablet mode experience is somewhere between dismal and unusable. The ipad pro can't do a handful of tasks, but for everything else the experience is excellent in both tablet and laptop mode. Those things the ipad can't do are largely niche (now that working with files is well supported), and are solvable limitations. The software problem on the surface pro is pervasive and unsolvable. They've done their best, but you can't make every piece of software written for Windows suddenly not require the precision of a mouse or suddenly support navigational gestures. I had a surface book 2, but got rid of it in favor of an ipad pro after using one for a while. I have a desktop that I use for gaming, but I would have that either way for the sheer power of it. The only thing that the ipad can't do well that I'd use it for is programming. This is not a dealbreaker for me, as I don't like programming on the go anyway, and if I really needed to then I can remote into a desktop to do it.

deegles 7y ago
> Those things the ipad can't do are largely niche Software development doesn't feel niche to me. It feels like it should be possible to publish a usable, high quality iPad app using nothing but an iPad.
- dhosek 7y ago
  When you're in the niche, it's hard to see out. I'm old enough to remember encountering the first computer magazine that didn't feature program listings (SoftTalk) and thinking who would want this thing? Programming is very much a niche activity (although I imagine that it's more a question of when rather than if that we'll see some sort of XCode for iOS).
  - ryukafalz 7y ago
    My take on this is that programming may be niche now, but it shouldn't be. Simple scripting is useful and lets you easily perform tasks that would otherwise be repetitive. I'm not saying everyone should be able to build a large application, but you shouldn't be stopped from building things on it, otherwise how will you even get started? Computers that stop you from inspecting them and learning how they work build a moat between the users and developers of the system. That's the opposite of what I think we should be encouraging.

gumby 7y ago

I will definitely get this new iPad Pro (have been waiting for this configuration) but this doesn't contradict your point as, for example, I don't intend to plug much of anything into it. Perhaps an HDMI adaptor or ethernet dongle, both of which I already have for my MB. By the sounds of the usual complaints my use case is quite uncommon (really I need a fast, multithreaded easy-for-demos device for a specific code base the engine of which runs on Linux/MacOS/iOS). It seems Apple is selling a boatload of iPads so they seem to think that few people want to plug things in. That seems absurd when I talk to my friends, but, well, I'm sure the usage data they get from people (like me) who enable that is telling them otherwise. As for the Surface: I've seen a couple and the hardware looks quite nice but in terms of weight and usability the MBA has been just fine. I often find myself using my current iPad to do something and then put it down and switch to the laptop. The use cases seem disjoint, partially due to the inherent limitations of each platform vs the other in certain regards, so over the years I've given up on thinking that a unified device would be worth it. I notice people have commented that some of your objections to the iPad have subsequently been rectified, but the core issues IMHO still remain. Another way to put it is that you now can do many laptop-like things on the iPad but it would hardly be your first choice, especially when it's so easy to switch to another device more adapted to things like filesystem manipulation. But if it's the only device you happen to have on your person you aren't stuck. Maybe Surface can find a way over that hump.

GoofballJones 7y ago

Ok. That's been the opposite experience of me. I got rid of the Surface Pro because it's a kludge. No matter how long Microsoft worked on touch/pen support to slap onto Windows, it still fails in being a good environment, at least for me. Plus, at the time, the battery life was abysmal. I'm not sure if they ever got better at that with the newer models. AND, no matter how much they played up that fricken kickstand, it was terrible in trying to use it on my lap. But then again, the iPad was the same. Enter the iPad, which was built from the ground up as a touch interface. but now it looks like they're coming at it from a different directly....a touch interface incorporating mouse/touchpad support. But, I'm for people using what they want to use. My use/need isn't the same.

Apofis 7y ago
The thing was absolutely terrible, I hated mine. It was extremely clumsy and unusable. We'll see about this new iPad Pro though, really excited about the trackpad support.

S_A_P 7y ago

For me the iPad is best for music and that sort of creative segment. It handles touch better than windows imo, and the os handles low latency applications much better. Core Audio is really just an exceptional framework for audio.

m3kw9 7y ago

You got the wrong computing device when you got your iPad, should have got a macbook

whywhywhywhy 7y ago

Microsoft and Apple diverged down two evolutionary paths. At release the Surface seemed ridiculous, adding touch and pen tools to a normal computer. Apple went the other way starting from scratch, touch only seemed the sensible choice. Now year on year as Apple adds more and more laptop computer into the iPad and it's Mac line lacks any modern input flexibility it's starting to look absurd they went down this route and the Surface line is making more and more sense the further we go down this road.