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An ipad would never survive a lab environment from falls alone, and thats not even mentioning liquids. they only last a few years under the best conditions befo

An ipad would never survive a lab environment from falls alone, and thats not even mentioning liquids. they only last a few years under the best conditions before the non-removable batteries crap out anyway. Plus total lack of repair options, no keyboard, and being overpriced makes them a hard sell. We wouldn't buy an inferior power supply or particle detector for double what its competitors cost, so i can't imagine blowing that money on a lab ipad. Many people i know use the used thinkpad x220 around the lab for computing, but there is always a proper lab notebook. If experiments from 20 years ago had stored their only lab notebook copy in a file, it's a practical gaurentee that it would be lost by now. Things are even more complicated and brittle in 2020. God help you if you rely on cloud storage for essential information unless you're prepared to watch like a hawk for the company's innevitable demise and 30 day deletion notice. There is still no realistic substitute for a shelf or cabinet with old lab books on it. Keeping physical lab books can also be a requirement of the grant.

criddell 6y ago
Lab books typically don't do well liquids either. At least with an iPad your data should be safe if it gets destroyed. Also, iPad batteries and screens are replaceable by Apple and you can definitely attach keyboards to them. Even if they did only last a few years, that's only a few dollars per day. Your lab probably spends more than that on coffee and tea for you.
- bluenose69 6y ago
  Must be nice. I've never worked in a lab where coffee and tea were provided. My lab books from the 1980s are still in fine form, because lab books are precious so people look after them. (Also, I was scared of losing something, so I photocopied them a month at a time, and stored the copies in a different location.) Since I put a table of contents at the start of each book, with a small set of keywords listed by every title, I can find things pretty well. A lot of people on this thread have stressed the importance of immutability, and that is really significant. When I found an error, I would make a new entry (on another page, maybe in another book) that corrected the error, and added information about this to a changelog. Oh, and I entered the table-of-contents line into a plain-text computer file for each entry, so I could search for things by phrase or keyword (grep is your friend). With a notebook with high-quality paper and a pen with good ink (I used India ink a lot, which is waterproof), the notes will easily last 100 years, maybe 1000 years. Do I think Apple's ipad format will last that long, or that Apple itself will? Not so much.

criddell 6y ago

Lab books typically don't do well liquids either. At least with an iPad your data should be safe if it gets destroyed. Also, iPad batteries and screens are replaceable by Apple and you can definitely attach keyboards to them. Even if they did only last a few years, that's only a few dollars per day. Your lab probably spends more than that on coffee and tea for you.

bluenose69 6y ago
Must be nice. I've never worked in a lab where coffee and tea were provided. My lab books from the 1980s are still in fine form, because lab books are precious so people look after them. (Also, I was scared of losing something, so I photocopied them a month at a time, and stored the copies in a different location.) Since I put a table of contents at the start of each book, with a small set of keywords listed by every title, I can find things pretty well. A lot of people on this thread have stressed the importance of immutability, and that is really significant. When I found an error, I would make a new entry (on another page, maybe in another book) that corrected the error, and added information about this to a changelog. Oh, and I entered the table-of-contents line into a plain-text computer file for each entry, so I could search for things by phrase or keyword (grep is your friend). With a notebook with high-quality paper and a pen with good ink (I used India ink a lot, which is waterproof), the notes will easily last 100 years, maybe 1000 years. Do I think Apple's ipad format will last that long, or that Apple itself will? Not so much.