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On the contrary, I have owned MacBook Pros from the first to the last 17", then again every model since the 16". I also have iPad Pro with magic keyboard and t

On the contrary, I have owned MacBook Pros from the first to the last 17", then again every model since the 16". I also have iPad Pro with magic keyboard and touch pad. I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me. I've also been CTO at mega bank and hedge funds where we've rolled these out along side laptops. I've found that after initial objections, folks tend to agree. After a month or two, white collars who are not devs generally have switched to carrying the iPads, not laptops. Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale. Users do have to think differently. That's ROUGH. Employees will ask for their old thing back if it changes their workflow, period. (See the book "Who Moved My Cheese?") If they just use it, they generally find out it's fine. Could even be argued the Office / Teams ecosystem is superior. Bonus: Letting employees have TWO screens (MacBook + iPad) also gives them two retina class monitors, portable, fantastic for hoteling or remote work or work from home. Two screens are better than one, and two that go with you are amazing. The new keyboard/cursor sharing while each device runs its own apps, with copy paste and drag drop between them is even cooler. In this model, the iPad Pro can become a Teams or Slack device, for instance, while other work stays on Mac, so you just wander off to a meeting with your collaboration tools intact. Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go.

roody15 4y ago
" I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me." Interesting, how long have you been iPad Pro only? At the price point of the iPad pro with a keyboard and touch-pad.. why not just buy a laptop like the MacBook Air? Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard seems less convenient than just using something like the MacBook Air. Unless I am missing something here.
- Terretta 4y ago
  > At the price point of the iPad pro with a keyboard and touch-pad.. why not just buy a laptop like the MacBook Air? 1. cellular + eSIM, missing from Air (WHY, Apple, why?) 2. detaches into perfect touchscreen tablet, Air doesn't 3. Apple Pencil (requires "Paperlike" for texture): https://paperlike.com https://paperlike.com 4. it's a great second screen in either extend desktop or keyboard/mouse mode > Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard No, the keyboard is the case, you have no sense of carrying a second thing. In fact, it's a magnetic dock, you USB-C charge through a port in the hinge, iPad pops on and off mag-safe style.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Interesting, I hadn’t heard of Paperlike. I’ll have to give it a try.
    - dbdoug 4y ago
      Paperlike is pretty pricey. I bought a similar screen cover on Amazon Canada by Bellmond for CAD$20. Works great!
- terminalcommand 4y ago
  I am a lawyer, my boss uses an ipad pro heavily for work. He usually does not have much time to work on stuff, we mail him the contracts, documents etc., he marks them up with digital pen with his comments and sends it to us to revise. He finds it extremely productive. He can give instructions on the go, even while physically walking to a meeting room. Prior to the ipad pro, we literally took printouts and handed it to the boss for his comments. He doesn't bother with word comments. Many older senior lawyers who learned the practice before word processors still work this way. For jobs not requiring much typing and special software, iPad pro can be a good addition. For replacing my work computer, oh no. If I were provisioned an ipad pro, I'd use it to read and markup contracts, look up legislation, occasionally jump into calls and I'd be pretty happy. I could work on my commute, quickly review documents and respond in off-hours etc. instead of carrying a laptop. The IT provisioned laptop takes ages to boot up, heavier and more fragile than an ipad. Another problem is that screen and keyboard doesn't quite replace pen and paper in my industry. I switched to Onenote from using a paper notebook during remote working and I miss taking notes on paper greatly. I frequently miss parts in contracts when I read on the screen and have to be extra careful. If I were in the office, I usually printed these out. I knew a senior lawyer who wanted us to print out every piece of related legislation so that she could work on it. She refused to read them on computer. iPad pro could be highly beneficial for low-tech human mind driven industries such as law. I know there is AI, I am grateful for redlines and spell checkers, but the computer screen and keyboard interface lacks in some ways.
  - wlesieutre 4y ago
    I'm in an architecture adjacent company and often deal with PDF drawing sets. When I get a 400 page PDF with E-size pages and I'm trying to look through a whole building to find or count something in it, I send those right over to the iPad. Now that I think about it, displaying gigantic PDFs is probably the most performance intensive thing I use it for, and the iPad Pro is very fast at it.
    - boppo1 4y ago
      What do you use for giant PDFs? I have some textbooks on mine, but nothing performs/functions as well as readera does on my android phone.
- derefr 4y ago
  For travelling specifically: • The Magic Keyboard acts as its own case for the iPad Pro. I wouldn't keep a bare laptop in my bag, but I would throw the iPad-Pro-in-keyboard-case in there. • The iPad (any iPad) is better for reading books, watching movies, and all the other stuff you do more of on planes/trains/automobiles, than a laptop is. The Keyboard Case holds the iPad up in the air by about two inches (getting the screen closer to your eyeline without straining your neck), and then lets you further position the screen at strange angles (e.g. "inward") for better viewing — angles you can't really adjust a laptop to. And if you want to read a PDF, a graphic novel, or anything else designed to be viewed vertically, you can, at full size — just pick it up and turn it. (Maybe pull the case off to make it lighter, if you're going to be reading for hours.) Basically, the same logic behind bringing a purpose-designed e-reader device. • If you have a Pencil to go with it, it can also be a reusable piece of paper with infinite "template" content pre-loaded — since you can arbitrarily mark up any PDF or image in the Files app, you can just load on a PDF of coloring-book pages, and now it's a coloring book; or grab a PDF of crossword puzzles, and now it's a crossword puzzle. No purpose-made apps required for either. (If you draw as a hobby, it can be your sketchbook, too; sadly, I'm no artist.) In other words, bringing an iPad also replaces packing those dimestore "activity books", and/or a notebook + actual pencil. • iPads (or really any convertable / 2-in-1, where you can fold away the angled keyboard part of the computer) are great for showing people the stuff you do / giving people demos — which is something you might be doing a lot at conferences, if that's why you travel. This is a pretty unique use-case; tablets themselves are really "the thing" for this. They maybe replaced... handing out brochures? Having a glossy explainer book printed, and then packing that? Bringing a portable projector + slides? • Kind of like the recent revival of "intentional dumbphones" that encourage "unplugging", the iPad is designed in a way that still allows for productive work, but makes it less fluid. I can SSH into prod from an iPad, but I don't want to do it for a minute longer than I have to. If you're travelling on vacation, this could keep you focused on relaxing, in a way you might not be if you have a laptop along, tempting you to spend eight hours ignoring your wife and kids to squeeze out that new feature that popped into your head. Notice that none of those are benefits of the iPad Pro specifically. I don't think that, for at least my use case, there's really much I'd get from an "iPad Pro with Keyboard Case" over an "iPad Air with Keyboard Case." Mind you, I have an iPad Pro... but I bought it because I had the money, and wanted the beautiful color-calibrated display; not because the Air wouldn't have suited my use-case just fine. (Though, when I bought it — 2019 — they weren't yet selling the Keyboard Case for the Air.)
- jxdxbx 4y ago
  I'm a lawyer and I also only travel with, and can do a lot (but not all) of my work on an iPad. I probably spend more on my iPad Pro + keyboard than I would for a laptop. But the iPad is also my primary e-reader, I watch movies on it, I take note on it legal pad style, etc. Google apps all suck on iOS so I don't use them. I occasionally remote in to a desktop for this or that, but less frequently. I mostly find that nerds who don't like iPads have opinions that are like 5 years out of date. Trackpad support is great on iPads. The Files app is all I need on a portable device for file management. I can use any USB device I ever want (though in practice, I never do).
- starbird3000 4y ago
  Usually it's still lighter. When I have back problems I will pick up the iPad and take it with me rather than my MacBook Pro. It has the added bonus of being easier to read pdfs and annotate them while traveling too (it's not perfect. If I'm gong to be digging around my email archives I prefer to do that on a Mac but that's partly the way our company limits Outlook on iPads.
ghaff 4y ago
I know people who are laptop power users who are fine traveling with just a tablet and an external keyboard. (They still use a laptop when they're not traveling.) Good for them but I've never been able to make it work for me. I'll just carry the extra weight. But, to your point, it's also true that, beyond getting an external keyboard, I've never really committed to making a tablet work for me as my only travel device (other than a phone).
debaserab2 4y ago
Why do the support costs go to zero? I would think iPads would bring their own set of problems/hazards that laptops may not have.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  It’s next to impossible to get an iPad to a non-working state. A creative user with a Windows laptop can do it easily unless it’s really tightly locked and controlled.
  - larrywright 4y ago
    And sometimes Windows just does that on its own.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Basically, they're an appliance, and hard for a user to screw up. Of course it's not actually zero. There's always someone whose finger can't poke things that will ask where the mouse is, or why this stupid iPad doesn't run Lotus 1,2,3 -- and you have to respect their challenges. Or of course (rare) hardware faults, and you have to provision a new one. But the appliance-ness of it makes it a support dream.
- lazide 4y ago
  Unless you are a power user who manages to overload it so severely it becomes unusable (not hard to do, if you’re a certain type of power user - unfortunately), it’s basically just a big iphone you can attach a keyboard too. Much harder to actually break or make unusable than the typical 5-10 yr old windows laptop from the lowest bidder most people interact with.
- stocknoob 4y ago
  How much spyware have you seen gunking up the default experience on an iPad? Compare this to a typical consumer laptop.
- tunesmith 4y ago
  I thought with an iPad you simply can't manage it remotely. If you can, I want to know, because my father-in-law keeps screwing up his iPad and I can't fix it without shipping it back and forth.
JAlexoid 4y ago
The biggest drawback of iPad OS is lack of windows, to drag around.If you don't need to multitask - iPad is OK. I tried going all iPad and my husband opted for iPad Pro as personal computer - it is woefully underutilized. "And that's not just me"
- Terretta 4y ago
  > biggest drawback of iPad OS is lack of windows, to drag around First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around. iPad Pro in its landscape dock provides split screen with adjustable ratio, as well as left and right floats, along with swipe between desktops, as well as push to view and pick a diff app. One app wide, one app narrow, tends to put the narrow app in iPhone UI, which is pretty ideal, better than desktop where windows refuse to get narrow. You can drive iPad with a magic touch pad beautifully. I suspect this workflow management is behind some of the gesture convergence in Ventura and iOS 16.
  - asdff 4y ago
    IMO productivity users are mostly lemmings. MacOS has plenty of good tooling built in to manage windows and desktop environments. A tiling window manager makes a lot of sense with cli based tools but for gui based tools imo becomes annoying fast. Especially when most websites these days will serve you a mobile website depending on the dimensions of your viewport.
  - Scharkenberg 4y ago
    > First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around. Interesting point of view, but I must either live in a parallel universe or know no "productivity users" (whatever that is supposed to mean) then. Windows' window management features cut it for 99.9% of Windows users, and the rest use PowerToys Fancy Zones or something of that sort.
    - moistly 4y ago
      And iPadOS window mgmt features cut it for 99.9% of users so… even stevens?
scoopertrooper 4y ago
Thing that really kills iPad for me is the web browsing experience. I just find iOS Safari so limiting. It's also needlessly slow (considering M1). I suspect they have some optimisations designed for memory constrained devices like iPhone tuned in the same way for iPad. Also ad blocker support is limited. Oh and in a lot of video calling apps, if I try and browse something in Safari while the meeting is happening, then I'll suddenly stop sending video. Though that isn't strictly a Safari issue, more a Apple holding back features from third-party developer issue.
- Terretta 4y ago
  > Also ad blocker support is limited. Try 1Blocker or AdGuard Pro. And similar limits (for similar "this shouldn't run that there" reasons) just arrived for the Chromium family. > needlessly slow I tend to find that when I notice slowness, I have several hundred tabs open, approaching the 500 tab limit. Save all tabs to bookmarks, close all tabs, and I find it's as "snappy" as the new iOS meme. (Related? New device, no tabs? Hmmm...) Super annoying this hasn't been resolved since introduction of cloud synced tabs.
  - anhner 4y ago
    > And similar limits (for similar "this shouldn't run that there" reasons) just arrived for the Chromium family. If only there were another browser other than Safari and Chromium that didn't have those limitations...
- THENATHE 4y ago
  Orion let’s you run full chrome and Firefox addons in iOS and iPadOS. No joke
  - johnfernow 4y ago
    That's incredible, thanks for sharing! Looks like it's still working on supporting some APIs (claims to currently support about 70% of Web Extensions APIs), and so far both the Firefox and Chrome NoScript extension don't appear to work for me on iOS, but that's awesome that they're working on adding support for Chrome and Firefox addons. I'll definitely keep an eye on this project.
agentdrtran 4y ago
I cannot imagine doing my job on on iPad, it's way too limited. can you open more than one google doc at a time yet? run desktop extensions on the web? open complex sheets/excel files? I have no idea what job other than sending emails and being on video calls all day could work on an ipad.
- dagmx 4y ago
  Yes to all of those and they’ve been supported for years with the slight caveat that extensions are more limited and need to be provided by an app
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    also the caveat that excel/sheets is not good on ipad.
  - agentdrtran 4y ago
    You absolutely can't open complex sheets on the ipad still, I just tried a few and they're not functional. how do you open more than one doc natively? I'm still seeing online that it's not supported (using the browser doesn't count). And yeah, none of the extensions I use have a special iOS equivalent.
    - dagmx 4y ago
      Why is using the browser not countable? It’s how I deal with sheets anyway on desktop.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
swah 4y ago
Are you talking about second screen as in Sidecar - or just to open the same app that you would use a Macbook for - eg Slack, email?
pinot 4y ago
Anything in the gSuite is terrible on iPadOS. Excel is also fairly crippled. I can’t see how it’s usable at all. Even just for emailing, GMail at least is a terrible application on iPad. For examples, cannot format anything, or view one email while writing another (that isn’t a reply). I primarily use mine for * Note taking * Browsing/showing PDFs in a construction engineering setting. Nothing is faster or as flexible. * Sketching for construction drawings But the lack of good tabular worksheet and emails beyond quick replies pushes me back to my laptop all the time.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I gsuite good anywhere? It's not good in the browser on desktop/laptop devices, certainly. I have noticed they cut tons of features from the iOS versions and keep you from using the site if they're installed (and maybe even if they're not? That's got to be how I ended up with them installed, I wouldn't have done it by choice), which is super annoying and makes no sense since I'm sure it's all the same webtech crap as the "real" sites, just wrapped so it's "native".
  - posguy 4y ago
    The Gmail app ate multiple gigs of ram and repeatedly crashed on my prior two Android phones. Disabling it and using an alternate mail client works much better.
    - Grazester 4y ago
      That is strange. If it is one app that I have never had a problem with is Gmail on Android(Nexus and Pixel devices)
  - rpastuszak 4y ago
    >I gsuite good anywhere? It's not good in the browser on desktop/laptop devices, certainly. Re web-tech: All iPad/iOS browsers run a low-perf version of Safari under the hood. In my experience anything Google seems sluggish on Safari. Frankly, I think that a part of this is due to FUD (Safari is not slow). I still use FF and Safari for 99% of my browsing, but certain sites just require me to use Chrome.
thefz 4y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I can't think doing any meaningful work without access to the filesystem.
- cube2222 4y ago
  What do you mean with "filesystem" specifically, that isn't available on iPads? There's the Files app.
  - thefz 4y ago
    Does it allow you to have access to the whole fileystem, unrestricted access?
    - freeplay 4y ago
      It allows access to a filesystem, just not the root filesystem. You can do all the basic copy/cut/paste ops and create whatever folder structure you want. Don't expect to edit system files though. People spend lots of time looking for vulnerabilities to achieve that.
      - frosted-flakes 4y ago
        The iOS file system is very frustrating. By default, applications can only access individual files in their own sandbox, and if you want to point an application to a folder of media, you can't—it's simply not possible, or if it is it's so burdensome that it's simply not practical. Least of all for images, which for some reason are not accessible from the Files application and have to be manually exported from the photo gallery app, and music, which is not accessible at all: you need to clumsily use Apple's proprietary sync program on an actual computer. In contrast, Android also doesn't let you access the root file system, but the user folder is yours to do whatever the hell you want with, and if you want to give your audiobook or music app to your folder of mp3 files that you've collected over the years, you can.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      What do you need with unrestricted access to the root file system?
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad This is what everyone I know with both devices does. I still prefer my Mac, but I'm in the minority in the under-fifty crowd.
jasonlotito 4y ago
This isn't contrary. Quite the opposite. None of the cases you present are iPad only. They are iPad alongside laptops. They might find cases where the iPad is fine, but none are iPad only. And your "bonus" is basically an iPad Pro as a $1000+ chat device. Now, if you mean that they added an iPad Pro, and eventually stopped ever using their laptop, that's a different story, but that's not what you said in your comment.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
>> Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale. Genuine question - what is the biggest time sink/cost for support on laptops? Put another way, exactly why do support costs drop so much with the ipads?
- Lio 4y ago
  I remember a project in the early 00s at a place I was working. They were rolling out Windows tablets to installation engineers[1]. The justification was to reduce breakages to the screen and hinge of laptops[2]. It sounds daft but apparently it was not uncommon for people to leave their van keys on the keyboard and then shut the lid on them. By switching to tablets they hoped to get rid of that failure mode. I imagine that's quite specific but just having less moving parts will increase reliability in a large organisation. A keyboard on a ThinkPad might be easy to change if it fails but a keyboard an iPad will be even easier as it's not attached permanently. 1. In this particular case that means people in hard hats and high viz going up telephone poles and into holes in the ground all day. 2. Standard issue at the time was Panasonic ToughBooks.
selfmodruntime 4y ago
The fact that you can do all your work on an iPad as well as you could do it on a Laptop may say more about your work than the devices. I do not mean this in an insulting way, but perhaps your work is so disconnected from technology or the creative process that you could do it, no matter the device you're using?
bitL 4y ago
IMO companies should give their employees one e-ink screen instead to save their eyes. Most office-style work can be done well on those screens and they are much healthier. I now barely use paper as I use an A4 Onyx tablet with e-ink screen and do most of my notes there. It's so much better than using iPad for that.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  My concern with anything e-ink is display latency -- if the display isn't updating at a fast-enough clip, I don't think note-taking would be an enjoyable experience.
  - bitL 4y ago
    These days they have multiple modes - they can be fast depending on how precise pixels you can tolerate.
hartator 4y ago
> Two screens are better than one Seems annoying actually.
truncate 4y ago
I think for me a major bottleneck of using iPad as laptop is that the screen is still gonna be on heavier compared to keyboard, and the whole combo doesn't feel as solid and sturdy as a good laptop does. iPad feel more physically free in some ways (you can just use screen etc ...), and physically restrictive in others (doesn't feel like one big sturdy unit with keyboard). That all aside, as an engineer it's too restrictive and less fun. I'm sure it can get a lot of other non-programming workflows done quite well though.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  People have been using MS Surface for years now. So top heaviness is generally not an issue that impacts productivity. The magic keyboard works great. You can even get BT knock offs for 1/3 the price. Works fine on your lap.
  - truncate 4y ago
    I'm not questioning the productivity but the feel of it, if you care about that. It always feels natural to me when weight distribution is heavier towards the keyboard. I can't speak for Surface Laptop, which I think had a bulky keyboard, but the the normal ones (I think was called Pro), always felt weird. Obviously this all is personal choice. I think the overall point is, iPad is nice replacement only if you are not going to be using keyboard much.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
      I was referring to the Surface Pro. Forgot that the laptop even existed. A better keyboard for the Pro would be welcome but not a deal breaker. The cantilever design iPad keyboards are indeed very heavy to counter the tablet weight. Which brings the total weight of an iPad with the keyboard to almost MB Air weights. The iPad is really crippled by software. Undoubtedly they cannibalise their own sales by allowing MacOS to run on iPads. But they have purposely killed off their own product categories before. Having that dual mode device is great.
cm2187 4y ago
I wonder who at mega bank and hedge fund isn't using excel... My experience at mega bank is that the IT department is often delusional about what business users actually do.
- hnbear 4y ago
  There are plenty of depts with a good iPad use case, typically those with very standard workflows and few apps. Think about HR who just need Zoom/Meet/WebEx, Greenhouse (or whatever ATS), and email+calendars. Office admin, customer support, etc. all have simple needs that benefit from a really nice, but easily controlled and secured device. Also, don’t underestimate how much “the Spotify app works” will entice people too. Yeah, you won’t convert all the quants, engineers, etc but they aren’t the target. That said, in my experience they love the iPad as a second screen that’s very portable, in contrast to the high powered very unportable workstation. The biggest factor for iPad adoption is really: “is there an app”. Particularly with SaaS tools there’s often a decent which lends itself to iPad usage.
- hnews_account_1 4y ago
  Yeah this sounds ridiculous. I work at a large asset manager which is constantly upgrading tech after being hamstrung on the budget for many many years. Everyone gets an iPad if you ask for it and a lot of folks who travel need it for making notes in conferences etc. I don’t have a traveling job but I could still get one but it is useless for almost anything beyond doodling. I generally take meetings from my desk so I don’t even use a notebook in most cases and just type it up on my laptop. I did get a separate desktop because I have dev work that requires a lot of compute power from time to time but I manage with those two devices and have never felt anything lacking.
jiveturkey 4y ago
> Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go. Completely lost me. You don't logout, close all your windows, and so on, when you undock/unplug and go mobile. I never have a problem picking up and going with my laptop, then coming back to my desk right how I left it. And the 27" monitors (32" also common here) are far, far better for productivity and dev work than a 13" ipad HDR screen. iPad is a poor choice for a 2nd screen. You can even create a separate workspace for when you detach. I don't do that myself but plenty of my colleagues do. (If you don't do that then sometimes a window re-homes itself if you resize or move it while undocked, thinking that is its new home.)
hnbear 4y ago
Ran a similar play recently and found a similar result. Can’t understate how much people want the nice/fancy/pro device too. It’s hard to lure people off MBPs to generic PC laptops or chromebooks but an iPad Pro + magic keyboard is shiny enough. Not just lower support cost, but much higher security bar at a lower cost too. Having been at the same fund, and other big banks, that’s an important consideration. Strong MDM, yubikey support if you want it, decent app sandboxing, etc. gives a lot of security control in a nicer manner than on a desktop OS. Finally, I think the Office/GSuite issue depends so much on usecase and who’s using which bits of each suite. Gmail is so much nicer than Outlook, but GDrive horrible organizationally compared to OneDrive, while GDocs collab beats O365, etc.
- physPop 4y ago
  I'm curious about the workflow for these employees... How do your staff actually get things done? Are they in excel/word/email all day long? Custom apps? In dev/data science there are some okay cloud providers (gitpod, etc) that work resonably well on iPad in a pinch but I can't see moving dev full time to one.
  - hnbear 4y ago
    For our use-cases if you think about a recruiting team who are just using: - GSuite for email, calendar, etc - Zoom for candidate meetings - Greenhouse as an ATS Then those all have dedicated iPad apps which are very usable. Same story for office admin teams, EAs, etc.
overgard 4y ago
A few questions since this is a novel thing I haven't really heard of in the business world! 1) What tasks do the people you manage tend to do on their machines? 2) Why replace the laptops with iPads if you expected it to be disruptive for a month?
pottertheotter 4y ago
I think there's a big difference between traveling with an iPad Pro and only having an iPad Pro.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
You might not need anything else if you only do some presentation work, data display or write some mails. It also shines for people that like to write non-digitally. Awesome to draw a quick sketch. But for anything else? Not really a working device. It seems to convince management because Apple is shiny. This isn't some topic about thinking differently, this is a topic of being restricted, which frankly iOS (before rebranding) simply does to you. Maybe you can map all your workflows to some iOS tool, but I assure you that a notebook is still more powerful. The two monitors might indeed be an advantage though and I hate any form of hoteling and luckily don't do that too often.

roody15 4y ago

" I don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad. But it's not just me." Interesting, how long have you been iPad Pro only? At the price point of the iPad pro with a keyboard and touch-pad.. why not just buy a laptop like the MacBook Air? Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard seems less convenient than just using something like the MacBook Air. Unless I am missing something here.

Terretta 4y ago
> At the price point of the iPad pro with a keyboard and touch-pad.. why not just buy a laptop like the MacBook Air? 1. cellular + eSIM, missing from Air (WHY, Apple, why?) 2. detaches into perfect touchscreen tablet, Air doesn't 3. Apple Pencil (requires "Paperlike" for texture): https://paperlike.com https://paperlike.com 4. it's a great second screen in either extend desktop or keyboard/mouse mode > Hauling around an iPad pro with a touchpad.. and an external keyboard No, the keyboard is the case, you have no sense of carrying a second thing. In fact, it's a magnetic dock, you USB-C charge through a port in the hinge, iPad pops on and off mag-safe style.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Interesting, I hadn’t heard of Paperlike. I’ll have to give it a try.
  - dbdoug 4y ago
    Paperlike is pretty pricey. I bought a similar screen cover on Amazon Canada by Bellmond for CAD$20. Works great!
terminalcommand 4y ago
I am a lawyer, my boss uses an ipad pro heavily for work. He usually does not have much time to work on stuff, we mail him the contracts, documents etc., he marks them up with digital pen with his comments and sends it to us to revise. He finds it extremely productive. He can give instructions on the go, even while physically walking to a meeting room. Prior to the ipad pro, we literally took printouts and handed it to the boss for his comments. He doesn't bother with word comments. Many older senior lawyers who learned the practice before word processors still work this way. For jobs not requiring much typing and special software, iPad pro can be a good addition. For replacing my work computer, oh no. If I were provisioned an ipad pro, I'd use it to read and markup contracts, look up legislation, occasionally jump into calls and I'd be pretty happy. I could work on my commute, quickly review documents and respond in off-hours etc. instead of carrying a laptop. The IT provisioned laptop takes ages to boot up, heavier and more fragile than an ipad. Another problem is that screen and keyboard doesn't quite replace pen and paper in my industry. I switched to Onenote from using a paper notebook during remote working and I miss taking notes on paper greatly. I frequently miss parts in contracts when I read on the screen and have to be extra careful. If I were in the office, I usually printed these out. I knew a senior lawyer who wanted us to print out every piece of related legislation so that she could work on it. She refused to read them on computer. iPad pro could be highly beneficial for low-tech human mind driven industries such as law. I know there is AI, I am grateful for redlines and spell checkers, but the computer screen and keyboard interface lacks in some ways.
- wlesieutre 4y ago
  I'm in an architecture adjacent company and often deal with PDF drawing sets. When I get a 400 page PDF with E-size pages and I'm trying to look through a whole building to find or count something in it, I send those right over to the iPad. Now that I think about it, displaying gigantic PDFs is probably the most performance intensive thing I use it for, and the iPad Pro is very fast at it.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    What do you use for giant PDFs? I have some textbooks on mine, but nothing performs/functions as well as readera does on my android phone.
derefr 4y ago
For travelling specifically: • The Magic Keyboard acts as its own case for the iPad Pro. I wouldn't keep a bare laptop in my bag, but I would throw the iPad-Pro-in-keyboard-case in there. • The iPad (any iPad) is better for reading books, watching movies, and all the other stuff you do more of on planes/trains/automobiles, than a laptop is. The Keyboard Case holds the iPad up in the air by about two inches (getting the screen closer to your eyeline without straining your neck), and then lets you further position the screen at strange angles (e.g. "inward") for better viewing — angles you can't really adjust a laptop to. And if you want to read a PDF, a graphic novel, or anything else designed to be viewed vertically, you can, at full size — just pick it up and turn it. (Maybe pull the case off to make it lighter, if you're going to be reading for hours.) Basically, the same logic behind bringing a purpose-designed e-reader device. • If you have a Pencil to go with it, it can also be a reusable piece of paper with infinite "template" content pre-loaded — since you can arbitrarily mark up any PDF or image in the Files app, you can just load on a PDF of coloring-book pages, and now it's a coloring book; or grab a PDF of crossword puzzles, and now it's a crossword puzzle. No purpose-made apps required for either. (If you draw as a hobby, it can be your sketchbook, too; sadly, I'm no artist.) In other words, bringing an iPad also replaces packing those dimestore "activity books", and/or a notebook + actual pencil. • iPads (or really any convertable / 2-in-1, where you can fold away the angled keyboard part of the computer) are great for showing people the stuff you do / giving people demos — which is something you might be doing a lot at conferences, if that's why you travel. This is a pretty unique use-case; tablets themselves are really "the thing" for this. They maybe replaced... handing out brochures? Having a glossy explainer book printed, and then packing that? Bringing a portable projector + slides? • Kind of like the recent revival of "intentional dumbphones" that encourage "unplugging", the iPad is designed in a way that still allows for productive work, but makes it less fluid. I can SSH into prod from an iPad, but I don't want to do it for a minute longer than I have to. If you're travelling on vacation, this could keep you focused on relaxing, in a way you might not be if you have a laptop along, tempting you to spend eight hours ignoring your wife and kids to squeeze out that new feature that popped into your head. Notice that none of those are benefits of the iPad Pro specifically. I don't think that, for at least my use case, there's really much I'd get from an "iPad Pro with Keyboard Case" over an "iPad Air with Keyboard Case." Mind you, I have an iPad Pro... but I bought it because I had the money, and wanted the beautiful color-calibrated display; not because the Air wouldn't have suited my use-case just fine. (Though, when I bought it — 2019 — they weren't yet selling the Keyboard Case for the Air.)
jxdxbx 4y ago
I'm a lawyer and I also only travel with, and can do a lot (but not all) of my work on an iPad. I probably spend more on my iPad Pro + keyboard than I would for a laptop. But the iPad is also my primary e-reader, I watch movies on it, I take note on it legal pad style, etc. Google apps all suck on iOS so I don't use them. I occasionally remote in to a desktop for this or that, but less frequently. I mostly find that nerds who don't like iPads have opinions that are like 5 years out of date. Trackpad support is great on iPads. The Files app is all I need on a portable device for file management. I can use any USB device I ever want (though in practice, I never do).
starbird3000 4y ago
Usually it's still lighter. When I have back problems I will pick up the iPad and take it with me rather than my MacBook Pro. It has the added bonus of being easier to read pdfs and annotate them while traveling too (it's not perfect. If I'm gong to be digging around my email archives I prefer to do that on a Mac but that's partly the way our company limits Outlook on iPads.

ghaff 4y ago

I know people who are laptop power users who are fine traveling with just a tablet and an external keyboard. (They still use a laptop when they're not traveling.) Good for them but I've never been able to make it work for me. I'll just carry the extra weight. But, to your point, it's also true that, beyond getting an external keyboard, I've never really committed to making a tablet work for me as my only travel device (other than a phone).

debaserab2 4y ago

Why do the support costs go to zero? I would think iPads would bring their own set of problems/hazards that laptops may not have.

theshrike79 4y ago
It’s next to impossible to get an iPad to a non-working state. A creative user with a Windows laptop can do it easily unless it’s really tightly locked and controlled.
- larrywright 4y ago
  And sometimes Windows just does that on its own.
Terretta 4y ago
Basically, they're an appliance, and hard for a user to screw up. Of course it's not actually zero. There's always someone whose finger can't poke things that will ask where the mouse is, or why this stupid iPad doesn't run Lotus 1,2,3 -- and you have to respect their challenges. Or of course (rare) hardware faults, and you have to provision a new one. But the appliance-ness of it makes it a support dream.
lazide 4y ago
Unless you are a power user who manages to overload it so severely it becomes unusable (not hard to do, if you’re a certain type of power user - unfortunately), it’s basically just a big iphone you can attach a keyboard too. Much harder to actually break or make unusable than the typical 5-10 yr old windows laptop from the lowest bidder most people interact with.
stocknoob 4y ago
How much spyware have you seen gunking up the default experience on an iPad? Compare this to a typical consumer laptop.
tunesmith 4y ago
I thought with an iPad you simply can't manage it remotely. If you can, I want to know, because my father-in-law keeps screwing up his iPad and I can't fix it without shipping it back and forth.

JAlexoid 4y ago

The biggest drawback of iPad OS is lack of windows, to drag around.If you don't need to multitask - iPad is OK. I tried going all iPad and my husband opted for iPad Pro as personal computer - it is woefully underutilized. "And that's not just me"

Terretta 4y ago
> biggest drawback of iPad OS is lack of windows, to drag around First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around. iPad Pro in its landscape dock provides split screen with adjustable ratio, as well as left and right floats, along with swipe between desktops, as well as push to view and pick a diff app. One app wide, one app narrow, tends to put the narrow app in iPhone UI, which is pretty ideal, better than desktop where windows refuse to get narrow. You can drive iPad with a magic touch pad beautifully. I suspect this workflow management is behind some of the gesture convergence in Ventura and iOS 16.
- asdff 4y ago
  IMO productivity users are mostly lemmings. MacOS has plenty of good tooling built in to manage windows and desktop environments. A tiling window manager makes a lot of sense with cli based tools but for gui based tools imo becomes annoying fast. Especially when most websites these days will serve you a mobile website depending on the dimensions of your viewport.
- Scharkenberg 4y ago
  > First thing productivity users do to a Win or Mac laptop is install a windows manager so they don't drag windows around. Interesting point of view, but I must either live in a parallel universe or know no "productivity users" (whatever that is supposed to mean) then. Windows' window management features cut it for 99.9% of Windows users, and the rest use PowerToys Fancy Zones or something of that sort.
  - moistly 4y ago
    And iPadOS window mgmt features cut it for 99.9% of users so… even stevens?

scoopertrooper 4y ago

Thing that really kills iPad for me is the web browsing experience. I just find iOS Safari so limiting. It's also needlessly slow (considering M1). I suspect they have some optimisations designed for memory constrained devices like iPhone tuned in the same way for iPad. Also ad blocker support is limited. Oh and in a lot of video calling apps, if I try and browse something in Safari while the meeting is happening, then I'll suddenly stop sending video. Though that isn't strictly a Safari issue, more a Apple holding back features from third-party developer issue.

Terretta 4y ago
> Also ad blocker support is limited. Try 1Blocker or AdGuard Pro. And similar limits (for similar "this shouldn't run that there" reasons) just arrived for the Chromium family. > needlessly slow I tend to find that when I notice slowness, I have several hundred tabs open, approaching the 500 tab limit. Save all tabs to bookmarks, close all tabs, and I find it's as "snappy" as the new iOS meme. (Related? New device, no tabs? Hmmm...) Super annoying this hasn't been resolved since introduction of cloud synced tabs.
- anhner 4y ago
  > And similar limits (for similar "this shouldn't run that there" reasons) just arrived for the Chromium family. If only there were another browser other than Safari and Chromium that didn't have those limitations...
THENATHE 4y ago
Orion let’s you run full chrome and Firefox addons in iOS and iPadOS. No joke
- johnfernow 4y ago
  That's incredible, thanks for sharing! Looks like it's still working on supporting some APIs (claims to currently support about 70% of Web Extensions APIs), and so far both the Firefox and Chrome NoScript extension don't appear to work for me on iOS, but that's awesome that they're working on adding support for Chrome and Firefox addons. I'll definitely keep an eye on this project.

agentdrtran 4y ago

I cannot imagine doing my job on on iPad, it's way too limited. can you open more than one google doc at a time yet? run desktop extensions on the web? open complex sheets/excel files? I have no idea what job other than sending emails and being on video calls all day could work on an ipad.

dagmx 4y ago
Yes to all of those and they’ve been supported for years with the slight caveat that extensions are more limited and need to be provided by an app
- LegitShady 4y ago
  also the caveat that excel/sheets is not good on ipad.
- agentdrtran 4y ago
  You absolutely can't open complex sheets on the ipad still, I just tried a few and they're not functional. how do you open more than one doc natively? I'm still seeing online that it's not supported (using the browser doesn't count). And yeah, none of the extensions I use have a special iOS equivalent.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    Why is using the browser not countable? It’s how I deal with sheets anyway on desktop.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

swah 4y ago

Are you talking about second screen as in Sidecar - or just to open the same app that you would use a Macbook for - eg Slack, email?

pinot 4y ago

Anything in the gSuite is terrible on iPadOS. Excel is also fairly crippled. I can’t see how it’s usable at all. Even just for emailing, GMail at least is a terrible application on iPad. For examples, cannot format anything, or view one email while writing another (that isn’t a reply). I primarily use mine for * Note taking * Browsing/showing PDFs in a construction engineering setting. Nothing is faster or as flexible. * Sketching for construction drawings But the lack of good tabular worksheet and emails beyond quick replies pushes me back to my laptop all the time.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I gsuite good anywhere? It's not good in the browser on desktop/laptop devices, certainly. I have noticed they cut tons of features from the iOS versions and keep you from using the site if they're installed (and maybe even if they're not? That's got to be how I ended up with them installed, I wouldn't have done it by choice), which is super annoying and makes no sense since I'm sure it's all the same webtech crap as the "real" sites, just wrapped so it's "native".
- posguy 4y ago
  The Gmail app ate multiple gigs of ram and repeatedly crashed on my prior two Android phones. Disabling it and using an alternate mail client works much better.
  - Grazester 4y ago
    That is strange. If it is one app that I have never had a problem with is Gmail on Android(Nexus and Pixel devices)
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  >I gsuite good anywhere? It's not good in the browser on desktop/laptop devices, certainly. Re web-tech: All iPad/iOS browsers run a low-perf version of Safari under the hood. In my experience anything Google seems sluggish on Safari. Frankly, I think that a part of this is due to FUD (Safari is not slow). I still use FF and Safari for 99% of my browsing, but certain sites just require me to use Chrome.

thefz 4y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I can't think doing any meaningful work without access to the filesystem.

cube2222 4y ago
What do you mean with "filesystem" specifically, that isn't available on iPads? There's the Files app.
- thefz 4y ago
  Does it allow you to have access to the whole fileystem, unrestricted access?
  - freeplay 4y ago
    It allows access to a filesystem, just not the root filesystem. You can do all the basic copy/cut/paste ops and create whatever folder structure you want. Don't expect to edit system files though. People spend lots of time looking for vulnerabilities to achieve that.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      The iOS file system is very frustrating. By default, applications can only access individual files in their own sandbox, and if you want to point an application to a folder of media, you can't—it's simply not possible, or if it is it's so burdensome that it's simply not practical. Least of all for images, which for some reason are not accessible from the Files application and have to be manually exported from the photo gallery app, and music, which is not accessible at all: you need to clumsily use Apple's proprietary sync program on an actual computer. In contrast, Android also doesn't let you access the root file system, but the user folder is yours to do whatever the hell you want with, and if you want to give your audiobook or music app to your folder of mp3 files that you've collected over the years, you can.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    What do you need with unrestricted access to the root file system?

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> don't travel with the MacBook any more, as I can do anything from the iPad This is what everyone I know with both devices does. I still prefer my Mac, but I'm in the minority in the under-fifty crowd.

jasonlotito 4y ago

This isn't contrary. Quite the opposite. None of the cases you present are iPad only. They are iPad alongside laptops. They might find cases where the iPad is fine, but none are iPad only. And your "bonus" is basically an iPad Pro as a $1000+ chat device. Now, if you mean that they added an iPad Pro, and eventually stopped ever using their laptop, that's a different story, but that's not what you said in your comment.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago

>> Then the support costs basically go to zero, which matters a good deal at scale. Genuine question - what is the biggest time sink/cost for support on laptops? Put another way, exactly why do support costs drop so much with the ipads?

Lio 4y ago
I remember a project in the early 00s at a place I was working. They were rolling out Windows tablets to installation engineers[1]. The justification was to reduce breakages to the screen and hinge of laptops[2]. It sounds daft but apparently it was not uncommon for people to leave their van keys on the keyboard and then shut the lid on them. By switching to tablets they hoped to get rid of that failure mode. I imagine that's quite specific but just having less moving parts will increase reliability in a large organisation. A keyboard on a ThinkPad might be easy to change if it fails but a keyboard an iPad will be even easier as it's not attached permanently. 1. In this particular case that means people in hard hats and high viz going up telephone poles and into holes in the ground all day. 2. Standard issue at the time was Panasonic ToughBooks.

selfmodruntime 4y ago

The fact that you can do all your work on an iPad as well as you could do it on a Laptop may say more about your work than the devices. I do not mean this in an insulting way, but perhaps your work is so disconnected from technology or the creative process that you could do it, no matter the device you're using?

bitL 4y ago

IMO companies should give their employees one e-ink screen instead to save their eyes. Most office-style work can be done well on those screens and they are much healthier. I now barely use paper as I use an A4 Onyx tablet with e-ink screen and do most of my notes there. It's so much better than using iPad for that.

ascagnel_ 4y ago
My concern with anything e-ink is display latency -- if the display isn't updating at a fast-enough clip, I don't think note-taking would be an enjoyable experience.
- bitL 4y ago
  These days they have multiple modes - they can be fast depending on how precise pixels you can tolerate.

hartator 4y ago

> Two screens are better than one Seems annoying actually.

truncate 4y ago

I think for me a major bottleneck of using iPad as laptop is that the screen is still gonna be on heavier compared to keyboard, and the whole combo doesn't feel as solid and sturdy as a good laptop does. iPad feel more physically free in some ways (you can just use screen etc ...), and physically restrictive in others (doesn't feel like one big sturdy unit with keyboard). That all aside, as an engineer it's too restrictive and less fun. I'm sure it can get a lot of other non-programming workflows done quite well though.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
People have been using MS Surface for years now. So top heaviness is generally not an issue that impacts productivity. The magic keyboard works great. You can even get BT knock offs for 1/3 the price. Works fine on your lap.
- truncate 4y ago
  I'm not questioning the productivity but the feel of it, if you care about that. It always feels natural to me when weight distribution is heavier towards the keyboard. I can't speak for Surface Laptop, which I think had a bulky keyboard, but the the normal ones (I think was called Pro), always felt weird. Obviously this all is personal choice. I think the overall point is, iPad is nice replacement only if you are not going to be using keyboard much.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    I was referring to the Surface Pro. Forgot that the laptop even existed. A better keyboard for the Pro would be welcome but not a deal breaker. The cantilever design iPad keyboards are indeed very heavy to counter the tablet weight. Which brings the total weight of an iPad with the keyboard to almost MB Air weights. The iPad is really crippled by software. Undoubtedly they cannibalise their own sales by allowing MacOS to run on iPads. But they have purposely killed off their own product categories before. Having that dual mode device is great.

cm2187 4y ago

I wonder who at mega bank and hedge fund isn't using excel... My experience at mega bank is that the IT department is often delusional about what business users actually do.

hnbear 4y ago
There are plenty of depts with a good iPad use case, typically those with very standard workflows and few apps. Think about HR who just need Zoom/Meet/WebEx, Greenhouse (or whatever ATS), and email+calendars. Office admin, customer support, etc. all have simple needs that benefit from a really nice, but easily controlled and secured device. Also, don’t underestimate how much “the Spotify app works” will entice people too. Yeah, you won’t convert all the quants, engineers, etc but they aren’t the target. That said, in my experience they love the iPad as a second screen that’s very portable, in contrast to the high powered very unportable workstation. The biggest factor for iPad adoption is really: “is there an app”. Particularly with SaaS tools there’s often a decent which lends itself to iPad usage.
hnews_account_1 4y ago
Yeah this sounds ridiculous. I work at a large asset manager which is constantly upgrading tech after being hamstrung on the budget for many many years. Everyone gets an iPad if you ask for it and a lot of folks who travel need it for making notes in conferences etc. I don’t have a traveling job but I could still get one but it is useless for almost anything beyond doodling. I generally take meetings from my desk so I don’t even use a notebook in most cases and just type it up on my laptop. I did get a separate desktop because I have dev work that requires a lot of compute power from time to time but I manage with those two devices and have never felt anything lacking.

jiveturkey 4y ago

> Instead of picking up where you left off, you just pick up and go. Completely lost me. You don't logout, close all your windows, and so on, when you undock/unplug and go mobile. I never have a problem picking up and going with my laptop, then coming back to my desk right how I left it. And the 27" monitors (32" also common here) are far, far better for productivity and dev work than a 13" ipad HDR screen. iPad is a poor choice for a 2nd screen. You can even create a separate workspace for when you detach. I don't do that myself but plenty of my colleagues do. (If you don't do that then sometimes a window re-homes itself if you resize or move it while undocked, thinking that is its new home.)

hnbear 4y ago

Ran a similar play recently and found a similar result. Can’t understate how much people want the nice/fancy/pro device too. It’s hard to lure people off MBPs to generic PC laptops or chromebooks but an iPad Pro + magic keyboard is shiny enough. Not just lower support cost, but much higher security bar at a lower cost too. Having been at the same fund, and other big banks, that’s an important consideration. Strong MDM, yubikey support if you want it, decent app sandboxing, etc. gives a lot of security control in a nicer manner than on a desktop OS. Finally, I think the Office/GSuite issue depends so much on usecase and who’s using which bits of each suite. Gmail is so much nicer than Outlook, but GDrive horrible organizationally compared to OneDrive, while GDocs collab beats O365, etc.

physPop 4y ago
I'm curious about the workflow for these employees... How do your staff actually get things done? Are they in excel/word/email all day long? Custom apps? In dev/data science there are some okay cloud providers (gitpod, etc) that work resonably well on iPad in a pinch but I can't see moving dev full time to one.
- hnbear 4y ago
  For our use-cases if you think about a recruiting team who are just using: - GSuite for email, calendar, etc - Zoom for candidate meetings - Greenhouse as an ATS Then those all have dedicated iPad apps which are very usable. Same story for office admin teams, EAs, etc.

overgard 4y ago

A few questions since this is a novel thing I haven't really heard of in the business world! 1) What tasks do the people you manage tend to do on their machines? 2) Why replace the laptops with iPads if you expected it to be disruptive for a month?

pottertheotter 4y ago

I think there's a big difference between traveling with an iPad Pro and only having an iPad Pro.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

You might not need anything else if you only do some presentation work, data display or write some mails. It also shines for people that like to write non-digitally. Awesome to draw a quick sketch. But for anything else? Not really a working device. It seems to convince management because Apple is shiny. This isn't some topic about thinking differently, this is a topic of being restricted, which frankly iOS (before rebranding) simply does to you. Maybe you can map all your workflows to some iOS tool, but I assure you that a notebook is still more powerful. The two monitors might indeed be an advantage though and I hate any form of hoteling and luckily don't do that too often.