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What's absurd to me is: forget all of what this article writes about, because Apple could fix all of it and the iPad would still be fundamentally flawed at a mo

What's absurd to me is: forget all of what this article writes about, because Apple could fix all of it and the iPad would still be fundamentally flawed at a more basic level than anything listed, because editing text is horrifically broken, has been since the first iPhone came out, and hasn't seen any significant improvement since I can't remember. And the crazy part is: just like this article, everyone overlooks it. Pay attention, and you'll notice it. (sorry to everyone who had blanked it out). Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words. It's agonizing once you think about it, and Apple (nor Google, as far as I know) has done zero to fix it in years (a decade?).

rocmcd 2y ago
How do you suggest they begin to address it? I have reached the point where I believe it is a fundamental flaw in _all_ touch-screen interfaces. I would certainly love to see better alternatives.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  That's a fair question to ask. The cheeky answer is that it's not my problem to solve, it's theirs. But I am a product manager, so I'll take a shot. None of these replace what we have. Some of them conflict. 1. Bring back deep presses, which isn't very discoverable, but it's memorable once you get used to it, and make it immediately position the cursor. 2. Allow touching with two fingers. If they're next to each other, immediately position the cursor. Spread them and the selection widens. 3. Allow double-tap to select a word. 4. Double-tap and drag to select word by word. 5. Pinch on a selection to cut. 6. Deep press on a selection and drag-swipe in different directions to copy, cut, and formatting options. 7. Deep press on an unselected spot and drag-swipe in different directions to paste and other options.
  - samldev 2y ago
    FWIW I use 3 and 4 on iOS all the time for fixing typos etc
    - gcanyon 2y ago
      Ha, yes, I knew that 3 was a thing (4 was new to me) and just forgot it as I was stream-of-conscious-ing my way through that list.
  - maccard 2y ago
    I like your thinking, a few thoughts (I'm on iOS) > Bring back deep presses, which isn't very discoverable, but it's memorable once you get used to it. Apple does this with many gestures already. Double tap to select a word for example. I think bringing back deep press would be a great move, and agree with everything else you've said here on that. > 2. Allow touching with two fingers. If they're next to each other, immediately position the cursor. Long press will put the cursor where your finger is, and will give you a magnified bubble for finer selection (did you really mean to select before or after the hyphen?) > Spread them and the selection widen ... Pinch on a selection to... these pinch style gestures would be unusable on a 5" screen I think, and incredibly fiddly even on a 10.1" iPad screen. I work in games, and even though our controllers can handle multiple inputs, we generally tend to avoid chorded inputs because the average person's dexterity is not as good as you would think.
    - gcanyon 2y ago
      Yeah, the pinch stuff probably wouldn't work well on a phone. I don't know for certain that the problem is even solvable. But it could be made better, and it's clear Apple either doesn't care to try, or thinks that the tools are so frozen in peoples' minds that innovation wouldn't be accepted.
      - maccard 2y ago
        Yeah I think you're right. I think deep press was a very intuitive feeling gesture that should come back and would give some freedom in this space.
- antipurist 2y ago
  You might find Eloquent[1] (and a related HN discussion[2]) interesting. [1] https://www.32al.io/projects/eloquent/ https://www.32al.io/projects/eloquent/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  A full on-screen keyboard that can be summoned anywhere helps a lot. On a 13" device there's no excuse to not have Ctrl, Cmd, Alt, Tab and Shift keys, complete with escape and the arrow keys. It can be reduced in portrait mode, but should be there in landscape at least. That gives intuitive and ultra precise navigation, standard copy/paste, word by word navigation, fast and precise selection etc. And it's also super helpful for selection even outside of text fields.
walterbell 2y ago
> Apple (nor Google, as far as I know) has done zero to fix it in years (a decade?) On iOS/iPadOS, touch-hold the virtual space bar and it becomes a trackpad for fine positioning of the cursor. Magic Keyboard is a laptop-quality input device where capslock can be remapped to Esc for vim editing in ssh.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  Yes, I know about the virtual trackpad, and it's still a pain in the butt to use. Before touch-and-hold, there was the faster deep press, which was better albeit not great, and the current setup is a regression. "add a keyboard" isn't an answer.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    > "add a keyboard" isn't an answer. The best keyboard in the history of mobile computing was by Blackberry. Blackberry (original and clone) physical keyboards are now available for both Android & iPhone, with some effort.
    - dgellow 2y ago
      IMHO the best keyboard was from the N900
      - walterbell 2y ago
        Psion/Communicator palmtop derivatives did have the space advantage of a landscape form factor. Sadly we never got a hardware successor for the dearly departed N900 Maemo and N9 Meego.
  - ako 2y ago
    Add a keyboard is an answer. On-screen keyboard will always be more limited, but I can accept that, as long as it’s good enough for situations where i can’t use an external keyboard. In situations where I know I will have to do a lot of text entry, it’s easy enough to add a keyboard, or use dictation. I use the same Bluetooth mechanical keyboard, Nuphy air 75, on both my MacBook Pro and my iPad, so keyboard experience is same for both, and both come with a suboptimal keyboard out of the box, including the MacBook Pro.
jeffhwang 2y ago
I partially agree. I don’t love typing on iOS/iPad OS and am much happier on a Mac. That said, hundreds of millions of people in the younger generation type blindingly quickly on software keyboard. Perhaps, like the dying art of handwriting in cursive or the decline in knowing how to drive manual transmission, this just how things will be? If this were truly such a fundamental problem, why hasn’t some enterprising Android vendor found success with smartphones using Blackberry-style hardware keyboards? Fwiw, I used Blackberries back before the 2007 iPhone launch and never found it addicting the way others did.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I've had (a few) people at work tell me that their kids are perfectly fine with writing a paper on an iPhone. And have actually turned down the offer to get a laptop. Boggles my mind but <shrug>. My older iPad gave up the ghost recently and my old MacBook Pro is pretty heavy by today's standards to travel by air with. I don't really work on trips any longer so when I get home, I'll likely get one of the new iPad Airs with accessories and just traveling with a Macbook. (My lightweight Chromebook also went so far out of support, it doesn't work any longer--about 12 years old.
  - oblio 2y ago
    Once you actually see them typing you'll realize that they're not actually more efficient, just used to it and they don't have as much experience with physical keyboards. Auto completion helps with some things but if what you're doing is not straightforward, well, good luck to ya.
    - curt15 2y ago
      Are kids still taught touch-typing in school these days?
      - ghaff 2y ago
        I didn’t type at all until college years ago and have never taken a typing course.
cjk2 2y ago
As a very very regular iPad user, and this may be against Apple's intentions, if you're using the on screen keyboard for that stuff you're doing it wrong and are a masochist. I use the Mac for any text editing job because you really need a proper computer for that and the iPad is not a proper computer. For me, the iPad is mostly a surface for writing on, general admin tasks and basic image editing. The Apple Pencil is the best input device I find. It's not a complete replacement device - it's complementary. Also my 11" iPad Pro is smaller than any laptop and charges off the same charger as my phone so it goes everywhere with me. I'm about to jump on a plane and it has a week's worth of entertainment, music, textbooks, notepad and Lightroom on it and a pencil stuck on the side. This is just perfect for me. But try and replace a macOS machine with it and you might as well chop your fingers off. The keyboard case is mostly ok but I just never use it. I should probably bounce it on eBay at some point but I keep it around "just in case". Edit: most of the people I know who use iPads got them mostly for the Apple Pencil support.
- SSLy 2y ago
  I've got mine for the enormous screen to read comics and PDFs on.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  > I use the Mac for any text editing job because you really need a proper computer for that and the iPad is not a proper computer. > For me, the iPad is mostly a surface for writing on, general admin tasks and basic image editing. I think that's pretty much what the business model grew into and is now cultivated and enforced. There is no Macbook convenient for consumption and no tablet convenient for processing. Either one can do both, but it's cumbersome. Apple knows they can get their target group to buy both products, so they take care to keep those territories isolated. And that's also revealing the general handicap the iPad Pro has: It is a product designed to close this gap, running on a OS designed to consciously maintain this gap.
  - VladTheImpalor 2y ago
    I detest this take so very much. It's as if people have forgotten that laptops were perfectly capable for that most loathesome of words, "consumption", for eons, thank you very much. I can connect my laptop to enormous monitors and have a lovely movie watching experience. Connect a projector to it, huge speakers, 4k resolution, HDR and whatnot. What's so much better about content consumption on an iPad that a PC cannot do? The fucking iPad really grinds my gears, it's the most woeful marker of our environmental excesses. Where even a supercomputer smartphone and a hypercomputer computer isn't enough for people. Lamentable.
deleted 2y ago
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anileated 2y ago
Typing and editing text has worked perfectly (with and without a proper keyboard) for many years on iDevices, until Apple broke it in the most recent OS version. Some major change, apparently related to spellchecker, hinders cursor movement now and results in entire words being unintentionally selected all the time. (PSA: if the recent change annoys you to no end, as it did me, you can get back the previous editing behavior by turning off spellchecker in OS settings.) Not counting source code, I type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it. > Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words. None of those are slow. You know you can: 1) tap anywhere in text to move the cursor? 2) long tap (and drag if desired) to do the same ignoring word boundaries? 3) hold spacebar to move the cursor around the text? Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all? Yes, if you like pain and insist on typing on a screen keyboard (I guess I do), certain text adjustments would be marginally slower than with a hardware keyboard, but on the other hand if you normally type English then swipe-typing more than compensates for that.
- eptcyka 2y ago
  It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste - why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard? Similarly, I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters. Moving the cursor is similarly infuriating. On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here? Wouldn't be as big of a problem if the spellchecker was not absolute garbage and handled multi-language text input, or just worked well for a single language. Honestly, I don't think the team working on the keyboard at apple has any linguists or any kind of diversity to pay attention to nothing but the most milktoast of English language use.
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    > why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard? You can tap and hold with three fingers to bring up the clipboard bar which has icons for undo, redo, cut, copy, and paste. Assuming that's what you mean by "access the clipboard"?
Modified3019 2y ago
This is my biggest pain point on the iPhone, and it’s somehow gotten worse in the last 1-2 years. Now it’ll sometimes insist on selecting certain words if I want to place the marker somewhere nearby, forcing a long press to bypass it. It’s such a goddamn chore.
- deleted 2y ago
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mort96 2y ago
Why is this minor complaint that's fixed by any one of the many official and unofficial keyboard attachments at the top of HN on an article about fundamental issues which can't be fixed without major iPadOS changes
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Don't you still need to select the text in the first place ?
  - mort96 2y ago
    Sometimes, and you can do that with the touch pad Look at the pictures here: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWR43LL/A/magic-keyboard-for-ipad-pro-13%E2%80%91inch-m4-us-english-white https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWR43LL/A/magic-keyboard-... -- does this device look significantly worse for text input than your typical laptop?
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      You're then relying on an accessory to guarantee text selection. I'm totally with you: the iPad looks like a competent device from every angle. That's why it's so sad it's only the looks and you have to bend over backwards for basic stuff like selecting a text from a web page or an app straight touching the screen. For comparison, as much as Windows is ugly and inelegant, there's no basic action on a Surface Pro that requires an attached touch pad.
      - mort96 2y ago
        I'm sure that the people who primarily use the iPad for drawing are happy that they don't need to have a keyboard attached at all times.
        makeitdouble 2y ago
        So the iPad should be viewed as a glorified MobileStudio Pro ? If I'm really into drawing why would I not go with Wacom then ? The range of pro/power users happy with the iPad right now looks awfully small to me. [0] https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-computers/wacom-mobilestudio-pro https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-computers/wacom-mob...
maccard 2y ago
I'm writing this on an iPhone: > Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text 4 taps - beginning of word, quote, end of word quote. > to correct a misspelling double tap on word, start typing the correct one. Double tap the word, and use the "replace" dropdown. Or, tap and use spacebar as a cursor to selectively edit a single word. This is certainly no worse than a mouse, but it is sub par to a physical keyboard. > to rearrange some words I'm not sure what you mean here, as I can't say that I find myself doing this often, so maybe I'm not your target audience here.
- NayamAmarshe 2y ago
  > double tap on word, start typing the correct one. Why can't I select the correct location and just backspace one or two characters instead? Android handles it perfectly fine, and has for more than a decade. > I'm not sure what you mean here, as I can't say that I find myself doing this often, so maybe I'm not your target audience here. Copy-paste menu is very finicky. Sometimes it appears, sometimes it doesn't, the selection marks seem to miss the mark occasionally as well.
  - maccard 2y ago
    I've had all the problems you mention on android over a 4 year period of a Pixel phone into a samsung phone, and none of them in the last 6 months going back to iOS > Why can't I select the correct location and just backspace one or two characters instead Press and hold and it will drop the cursor where you want.
wffurr 2y ago
This has come up on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804 is the discussion on a post by a Google researcher on text editing and how it's fundamentally flawed on mobile devices.
metalspoon 2y ago
There's a solution. All these iPadOS problems can be solved by installing macOS. Look, we now have touch pad support (and keyboards since long ago). There's no technical problem for Apple. It's ONLY that they don't want us to use macOS on iPads. There's really no excuse.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Apple denies it, but the look is in fact that they would rather iOS running on the Mac. I'm not sure where this aesthetic comes from — that somehow traditional desktop/laptops are an outmoded way of computing and that touchy, file-manager-less, terminal-less, tool-less computer use is the way we all ought to be doing things.
  - jkestner 2y ago
    It’s simply control. Can’t put that genie back in the Mac bottle
  - seec 2y ago
    It comes from the top, it's CEO and executive. When you don't use a computing platform to do useful stuff, as a "bicycle for the mind" as Steve Jobs said, it becomes much less clear how iOS/iPad OS can be lackluster in so many ways. Hilariously, even their office suite has limitations on iPad even though Tim Cook supposedly uses it. I'm sure he does but he probably has most of the real work pre-made for him, by people most likely using a Mac. People will often talk about the disconnection between the elite and the regular people which can also be found in the relation of manager to worker. And this is exactly a reproduction of that. When you don't really need to use the tools to make useful stuff there is no way to understand how inadequate they can be. Since they know how much they can profit from iOS with the App Store, they try to push it as much as possible, ignoring the fact that even if everybody wanted/agreed to do that it wouldn't even be technically possible, regardless of profits/prices considerations. There is no worse leader than one that doesn't periodically put himself in the position of the people he is leading. Tim Cook is unable to do that and he has imposed a feminine way of working: collaboration enforced by a pecking order determined by a social construct that doesn't care much about competence/capabilities and the values of ideas/work on their own merit. Now Apple will keep making good hardware because they have talents that know what they are doing and they have the means to throw money at basically any problem. But the finer details won't improve anymore, they refuse to properly compete in the open market and they refuse to compete internally because they now work on a model following feminin ideals that is not conductive to improvements. This is why the state of current Apple offerings is very frustrating: it's not going to improve in a cost matter because they clearly like their profits too much and it's not going to improve in a quality/functionality way because they just don't have the structure to do so anymore. Things will change, but probably not for the better and if so, it will probably be pure coincidence. Many of their passionate customer are intuitively making this realization which is why even the most diehard fans are starting to be pissed off (new iPads review sentiment is rather grim, even worse than their AVP that didn't do anything new or useful).
coldtea 2y ago
>because editing text is horrifically broken, has been since the first iPhone came out I don't know, it always worked fine for me, and I edit text a lot (writing on the iPad, not coding). >And the crazy part is: just like this article, everyone overlooks it Given the above, maybe not so crazy? Maybe you're too fussy? >Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; Why not put them when as you write it, in which case it's quote text quote? Is that not what one does 90% of the time? And if you remembered it later, how slow it is to just move the cursor to start and end of segment? With the spacebar cursor-move mode it's almost as fact as having a mouse. >to correct a misspelling Tap on squiggly-underlined word, accept correct spelling from suggestions? >and Apple (nor Google, as far as I know) has done zero to fix it in years (a decade?) Do what exactly? What fancy UI you have in mind that solves it? And if you do that much writing, why don't you just hook a bluetooth keyboard? Then with some shortcuts to jump by whole words/start-end of line/etc, you can fly, as you would on a laptop.
- avn2109 2y ago
  > "Maybe you're too fussy?" I agree with the parent. "You're holding it wrong." /s
- widowlark 2y ago
  I would like to better understand your mentality. Every Apple article I read has comments like yours, essentially saying "It works on my machine, its a YOU (the struggling users) problem". Do you genuinely believe your response is helpful? Just like the OC, I too have noticed the atrocious editing and word manipulation in iOS and, just like OC, I have been text editing for my entire life. iOS is objectively bad at it, in many specific ways. The only way to improve it is for us to be honest about how it can be better and go from there. Coping with the issues as if they dont even exist is not a good path forward.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >Every Apple article I read has comments like yours, essentially saying "It works on my machine, its a YOU (the struggling users) problem". Rather, I'm saying: "it works, period" (on all machines). The OC said it himself: "everyone overlooks it". Perhaps because it's not really there for them, and you're just more fussy ones? >Do you genuinely believe your response is helpful? Do you genuinely believe that any complain is legitimate? The purpose of my comment wasn't to help with it (since I don't consider it broken): it was to counter the idea that "editing text is horrifically broken". >iOS is objectively bad at it, in many specific ways. If it was "objectively bad" I and the other commenter wouldn't be able to refuse it, nor would "everyone overlook it".
baubino 2y ago
I write a lot (several thousand words per day) and even though I love the convenience of writing and editing on my iphone and ipad, it’s become clear in the last couple of years that if I want to write efficiently, I have to do it on my desktop. Text editing (for writing, not coding) has gotten significantly worse in iOS over the last 2-3 years, especially with long documents. I’m surprised that others haven’t noticed this.
- gumby 2y ago
  Don’t worry, plenty of us have. Surely a gajillion Apple employees have too. Crazy
  - bogwog 2y ago
    > Crazy One of the perks of lock-in is that you don't have to stress over every defect in your product.
    - gumby 2y ago
      Since there are a lot of Android and Windows devices out there, and the top applications are multiplatform (Whatsapp, FB, snapchat, much less wikipedia, google search and such) I'm not sure how much lock in there really is. Nerds like us who care about running code on our machines are really the minority. Just look how little volume and revenue Apple gets from the mac (if they were run like most businesses they would have sold off or shut down the mac business long ago)
      - bogwog 2y ago
        > I'm not sure how much lock in there really is. All the big tech companies are guilty of illegally suppressing competition in various ways, including locking customers into their platforms through various means. But Apple? Nobody goes as hard as Apple does with their lock-in strategies. I personally like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I'm not going to assume you're just being ignorant because you love Apple. Instead, I'm curious to know what makes you doubt that lock-in isn't their entire business model? For example, in what universe would iCloud (as it exists today) succeed if customers could actually choose an alternate cloud storage provider for their iPhone/iPad with the same level of system integration?
thih9 2y ago
> Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words. It's agonizing once you think about it, How would you implement it instead?
gumby 2y ago
> editing text is horrifically broken, has been since the first iPhone came out. IIRC editing text was barely even possible when the phone first came out. No cut/paste! I think it arrived in the same software release as the app store.
dkdbejwi383 2y ago
Just trying to place the caret anywhere other than the end of the input field is guaranteed to cause frustration. I frequently give up on writing things on my phone, saving them either for when I am at a computer with a real keyboard, or just not at all in many cases.
- cmwright 2y ago
  Still not great, but do you know about the spacebar trick? Anywhere the keyboard is open in iOS or iPadOS, press and hold the spacebar. The keyboard is now a trackpad and you can easily move the cursor. Incredibly bad discoverability but has been a big qol improvement for me.
knallfrosch 2y ago
It works fine on Android and the rare thin letter I can't catch, I simply backspace and write again. Suboptimal, but works within seconds. iPhone however? I've given up on the sub-word level. And it's amazing because they could simply copy Androids logic.
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NayamAmarshe 2y ago
Text editing on iPhones is so not ideal! Why is it so hard to edit words, put punctuations and copy-paste text? Android is lightyears ahead in the game.
FredPret 2y ago
I noticed when I moved from Android to iPhone years ago that placing the cursor is really hard. On Android I barely noticed doing it.
varispeed 2y ago
Reason why I don't use Apple mobile devices - the usability is worse than poor. So many convoluted things to do basic stuff.
bobbob1921 2y ago
This is absolutely correct, the text selecting/editing behavior on iOS 17 is unbearable. I remember reading a review or watching a video where someone said this is the type of problem that if Steve Jobs was still around would not exist after one or two minor updates, and I agree. Its as if there aren’t real people at Apple actually using and testing what they release (although I know that’s not the case) For now my work around is long pressing the spacebar to get the cursor to where you want. :(

rocmcd 2y ago

How do you suggest they begin to address it? I have reached the point where I believe it is a fundamental flaw in _all_ touch-screen interfaces. I would certainly love to see better alternatives.

gcanyon 2y ago
That's a fair question to ask. The cheeky answer is that it's not my problem to solve, it's theirs. But I am a product manager, so I'll take a shot. None of these replace what we have. Some of them conflict. 1. Bring back deep presses, which isn't very discoverable, but it's memorable once you get used to it, and make it immediately position the cursor. 2. Allow touching with two fingers. If they're next to each other, immediately position the cursor. Spread them and the selection widens. 3. Allow double-tap to select a word. 4. Double-tap and drag to select word by word. 5. Pinch on a selection to cut. 6. Deep press on a selection and drag-swipe in different directions to copy, cut, and formatting options. 7. Deep press on an unselected spot and drag-swipe in different directions to paste and other options.
- samldev 2y ago
  FWIW I use 3 and 4 on iOS all the time for fixing typos etc
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    Ha, yes, I knew that 3 was a thing (4 was new to me) and just forgot it as I was stream-of-conscious-ing my way through that list.
- maccard 2y ago
  I like your thinking, a few thoughts (I'm on iOS) > Bring back deep presses, which isn't very discoverable, but it's memorable once you get used to it. Apple does this with many gestures already. Double tap to select a word for example. I think bringing back deep press would be a great move, and agree with everything else you've said here on that. > 2. Allow touching with two fingers. If they're next to each other, immediately position the cursor. Long press will put the cursor where your finger is, and will give you a magnified bubble for finer selection (did you really mean to select before or after the hyphen?) > Spread them and the selection widen ... Pinch on a selection to... these pinch style gestures would be unusable on a 5" screen I think, and incredibly fiddly even on a 10.1" iPad screen. I work in games, and even though our controllers can handle multiple inputs, we generally tend to avoid chorded inputs because the average person's dexterity is not as good as you would think.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    Yeah, the pinch stuff probably wouldn't work well on a phone. I don't know for certain that the problem is even solvable. But it could be made better, and it's clear Apple either doesn't care to try, or thinks that the tools are so frozen in peoples' minds that innovation wouldn't be accepted.
    - maccard 2y ago
      Yeah I think you're right. I think deep press was a very intuitive feeling gesture that should come back and would give some freedom in this space.
antipurist 2y ago
You might find Eloquent[1] (and a related HN discussion[2]) interesting. [1] https://www.32al.io/projects/eloquent/ https://www.32al.io/projects/eloquent/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804
makeitdouble 2y ago
A full on-screen keyboard that can be summoned anywhere helps a lot. On a 13" device there's no excuse to not have Ctrl, Cmd, Alt, Tab and Shift keys, complete with escape and the arrow keys. It can be reduced in portrait mode, but should be there in landscape at least. That gives intuitive and ultra precise navigation, standard copy/paste, word by word navigation, fast and precise selection etc. And it's also super helpful for selection even outside of text fields.

walterbell 2y ago

> Apple (nor Google, as far as I know) has done zero to fix it in years (a decade?) On iOS/iPadOS, touch-hold the virtual space bar and it becomes a trackpad for fine positioning of the cursor. Magic Keyboard is a laptop-quality input device where capslock can be remapped to Esc for vim editing in ssh.

gcanyon 2y ago
Yes, I know about the virtual trackpad, and it's still a pain in the butt to use. Before touch-and-hold, there was the faster deep press, which was better albeit not great, and the current setup is a regression. "add a keyboard" isn't an answer.
- walterbell 2y ago
  > "add a keyboard" isn't an answer. The best keyboard in the history of mobile computing was by Blackberry. Blackberry (original and clone) physical keyboards are now available for both Android & iPhone, with some effort.
  - dgellow 2y ago
    IMHO the best keyboard was from the N900
    - walterbell 2y ago
      Psion/Communicator palmtop derivatives did have the space advantage of a landscape form factor. Sadly we never got a hardware successor for the dearly departed N900 Maemo and N9 Meego.
- ako 2y ago
  Add a keyboard is an answer. On-screen keyboard will always be more limited, but I can accept that, as long as it’s good enough for situations where i can’t use an external keyboard. In situations where I know I will have to do a lot of text entry, it’s easy enough to add a keyboard, or use dictation. I use the same Bluetooth mechanical keyboard, Nuphy air 75, on both my MacBook Pro and my iPad, so keyboard experience is same for both, and both come with a suboptimal keyboard out of the box, including the MacBook Pro.

jeffhwang 2y ago

I partially agree. I don’t love typing on iOS/iPad OS and am much happier on a Mac. That said, hundreds of millions of people in the younger generation type blindingly quickly on software keyboard. Perhaps, like the dying art of handwriting in cursive or the decline in knowing how to drive manual transmission, this just how things will be? If this were truly such a fundamental problem, why hasn’t some enterprising Android vendor found success with smartphones using Blackberry-style hardware keyboards? Fwiw, I used Blackberries back before the 2007 iPhone launch and never found it addicting the way others did.

ghaff 2y ago
I've had (a few) people at work tell me that their kids are perfectly fine with writing a paper on an iPhone. And have actually turned down the offer to get a laptop. Boggles my mind but <shrug>. My older iPad gave up the ghost recently and my old MacBook Pro is pretty heavy by today's standards to travel by air with. I don't really work on trips any longer so when I get home, I'll likely get one of the new iPad Airs with accessories and just traveling with a Macbook. (My lightweight Chromebook also went so far out of support, it doesn't work any longer--about 12 years old.
- oblio 2y ago
  Once you actually see them typing you'll realize that they're not actually more efficient, just used to it and they don't have as much experience with physical keyboards. Auto completion helps with some things but if what you're doing is not straightforward, well, good luck to ya.
  - curt15 2y ago
    Are kids still taught touch-typing in school these days?
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I didn’t type at all until college years ago and have never taken a typing course.

cjk2 2y ago

As a very very regular iPad user, and this may be against Apple's intentions, if you're using the on screen keyboard for that stuff you're doing it wrong and are a masochist. I use the Mac for any text editing job because you really need a proper computer for that and the iPad is not a proper computer. For me, the iPad is mostly a surface for writing on, general admin tasks and basic image editing. The Apple Pencil is the best input device I find. It's not a complete replacement device - it's complementary. Also my 11" iPad Pro is smaller than any laptop and charges off the same charger as my phone so it goes everywhere with me. I'm about to jump on a plane and it has a week's worth of entertainment, music, textbooks, notepad and Lightroom on it and a pencil stuck on the side. This is just perfect for me. But try and replace a macOS machine with it and you might as well chop your fingers off. The keyboard case is mostly ok but I just never use it. I should probably bounce it on eBay at some point but I keep it around "just in case". Edit: most of the people I know who use iPads got them mostly for the Apple Pencil support.

SSLy 2y ago
I've got mine for the enormous screen to read comics and PDFs on.
rickdeckard 2y ago
> I use the Mac for any text editing job because you really need a proper computer for that and the iPad is not a proper computer. > For me, the iPad is mostly a surface for writing on, general admin tasks and basic image editing. I think that's pretty much what the business model grew into and is now cultivated and enforced. There is no Macbook convenient for consumption and no tablet convenient for processing. Either one can do both, but it's cumbersome. Apple knows they can get their target group to buy both products, so they take care to keep those territories isolated. And that's also revealing the general handicap the iPad Pro has: It is a product designed to close this gap, running on a OS designed to consciously maintain this gap.
- VladTheImpalor 2y ago
  I detest this take so very much. It's as if people have forgotten that laptops were perfectly capable for that most loathesome of words, "consumption", for eons, thank you very much. I can connect my laptop to enormous monitors and have a lovely movie watching experience. Connect a projector to it, huge speakers, 4k resolution, HDR and whatnot. What's so much better about content consumption on an iPad that a PC cannot do? The fucking iPad really grinds my gears, it's the most woeful marker of our environmental excesses. Where even a supercomputer smartphone and a hypercomputer computer isn't enough for people. Lamentable.

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anileated 2y ago

Typing and editing text has worked perfectly (with and without a proper keyboard) for many years on iDevices, until Apple broke it in the most recent OS version. Some major change, apparently related to spellchecker, hinders cursor movement now and results in entire words being unintentionally selected all the time. (PSA: if the recent change annoys you to no end, as it did me, you can get back the previous editing behavior by turning off spellchecker in OS settings.) Not counting source code, I type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it. > Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words. None of those are slow. You know you can: 1) tap anywhere in text to move the cursor? 2) long tap (and drag if desired) to do the same ignoring word boundaries? 3) hold spacebar to move the cursor around the text? Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all? Yes, if you like pain and insist on typing on a screen keyboard (I guess I do), certain text adjustments would be marginally slower than with a hardware keyboard, but on the other hand if you normally type English then swipe-typing more than compensates for that.

eptcyka 2y ago
It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste - why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard? Similarly, I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters. Moving the cursor is similarly infuriating. On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here? Wouldn't be as big of a problem if the spellchecker was not absolute garbage and handled multi-language text input, or just worked well for a single language. Honestly, I don't think the team working on the keyboard at apple has any linguists or any kind of diversity to pay attention to nothing but the most milktoast of English language use.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard? You can tap and hold with three fingers to bring up the clipboard bar which has icons for undo, redo, cut, copy, and paste. Assuming that's what you mean by "access the clipboard"?

Modified3019 2y ago

This is my biggest pain point on the iPhone, and it’s somehow gotten worse in the last 1-2 years. Now it’ll sometimes insist on selecting certain words if I want to place the marker somewhere nearby, forcing a long press to bypass it. It’s such a goddamn chore.

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mort96 2y ago

Why is this minor complaint that's fixed by any one of the many official and unofficial keyboard attachments at the top of HN on an article about fundamental issues which can't be fixed without major iPadOS changes

makeitdouble 2y ago
Don't you still need to select the text in the first place ?
- mort96 2y ago
  Sometimes, and you can do that with the touch pad Look at the pictures here: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWR43LL/A/magic-keyboard-for-ipad-pro-13%E2%80%91inch-m4-us-english-white https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWR43LL/A/magic-keyboard-... -- does this device look significantly worse for text input than your typical laptop?
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    You're then relying on an accessory to guarantee text selection. I'm totally with you: the iPad looks like a competent device from every angle. That's why it's so sad it's only the looks and you have to bend over backwards for basic stuff like selecting a text from a web page or an app straight touching the screen. For comparison, as much as Windows is ugly and inelegant, there's no basic action on a Surface Pro that requires an attached touch pad.
    - mort96 2y ago
      I'm sure that the people who primarily use the iPad for drawing are happy that they don't need to have a keyboard attached at all times.
      - makeitdouble 2y ago
        So the iPad should be viewed as a glorified MobileStudio Pro ? If I'm really into drawing why would I not go with Wacom then ? The range of pro/power users happy with the iPad right now looks awfully small to me. [0] https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-computers/wacom-mobilestudio-pro https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-computers/wacom-mob...

maccard 2y ago

I'm writing this on an iPhone: > Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text 4 taps - beginning of word, quote, end of word quote. > to correct a misspelling double tap on word, start typing the correct one. Double tap the word, and use the "replace" dropdown. Or, tap and use spacebar as a cursor to selectively edit a single word. This is certainly no worse than a mouse, but it is sub par to a physical keyboard. > to rearrange some words I'm not sure what you mean here, as I can't say that I find myself doing this often, so maybe I'm not your target audience here.

NayamAmarshe 2y ago
> double tap on word, start typing the correct one. Why can't I select the correct location and just backspace one or two characters instead? Android handles it perfectly fine, and has for more than a decade. > I'm not sure what you mean here, as I can't say that I find myself doing this often, so maybe I'm not your target audience here. Copy-paste menu is very finicky. Sometimes it appears, sometimes it doesn't, the selection marks seem to miss the mark occasionally as well.
- maccard 2y ago
  I've had all the problems you mention on android over a 4 year period of a Pixel phone into a samsung phone, and none of them in the last 6 months going back to iOS > Why can't I select the correct location and just backspace one or two characters instead Press and hold and it will drop the cursor where you want.

wffurr 2y ago

This has come up on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804 is the discussion on a post by a Google researcher on text editing and how it's fundamentally flawed on mobile devices.

metalspoon 2y ago

There's a solution. All these iPadOS problems can be solved by installing macOS. Look, we now have touch pad support (and keyboards since long ago). There's no technical problem for Apple. It's ONLY that they don't want us to use macOS on iPads. There's really no excuse.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
Apple denies it, but the look is in fact that they would rather iOS running on the Mac. I'm not sure where this aesthetic comes from — that somehow traditional desktop/laptops are an outmoded way of computing and that touchy, file-manager-less, terminal-less, tool-less computer use is the way we all ought to be doing things.
- jkestner 2y ago
  It’s simply control. Can’t put that genie back in the Mac bottle
- seec 2y ago
  It comes from the top, it's CEO and executive. When you don't use a computing platform to do useful stuff, as a "bicycle for the mind" as Steve Jobs said, it becomes much less clear how iOS/iPad OS can be lackluster in so many ways. Hilariously, even their office suite has limitations on iPad even though Tim Cook supposedly uses it. I'm sure he does but he probably has most of the real work pre-made for him, by people most likely using a Mac. People will often talk about the disconnection between the elite and the regular people which can also be found in the relation of manager to worker. And this is exactly a reproduction of that. When you don't really need to use the tools to make useful stuff there is no way to understand how inadequate they can be. Since they know how much they can profit from iOS with the App Store, they try to push it as much as possible, ignoring the fact that even if everybody wanted/agreed to do that it wouldn't even be technically possible, regardless of profits/prices considerations. There is no worse leader than one that doesn't periodically put himself in the position of the people he is leading. Tim Cook is unable to do that and he has imposed a feminine way of working: collaboration enforced by a pecking order determined by a social construct that doesn't care much about competence/capabilities and the values of ideas/work on their own merit. Now Apple will keep making good hardware because they have talents that know what they are doing and they have the means to throw money at basically any problem. But the finer details won't improve anymore, they refuse to properly compete in the open market and they refuse to compete internally because they now work on a model following feminin ideals that is not conductive to improvements. This is why the state of current Apple offerings is very frustrating: it's not going to improve in a cost matter because they clearly like their profits too much and it's not going to improve in a quality/functionality way because they just don't have the structure to do so anymore. Things will change, but probably not for the better and if so, it will probably be pure coincidence. Many of their passionate customer are intuitively making this realization which is why even the most diehard fans are starting to be pissed off (new iPads review sentiment is rather grim, even worse than their AVP that didn't do anything new or useful).

coldtea 2y ago

>because editing text is horrifically broken, has been since the first iPhone came out I don't know, it always worked fine for me, and I edit text a lot (writing on the iPad, not coding). >And the crazy part is: just like this article, everyone overlooks it Given the above, maybe not so crazy? Maybe you're too fussy? >Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; Why not put them when as you write it, in which case it's quote text quote? Is that not what one does 90% of the time? And if you remembered it later, how slow it is to just move the cursor to start and end of segment? With the spacebar cursor-move mode it's almost as fact as having a mouse. >to correct a misspelling Tap on squiggly-underlined word, accept correct spelling from suggestions? >and Apple (nor Google, as far as I know) has done zero to fix it in years (a decade?) Do what exactly? What fancy UI you have in mind that solves it? And if you do that much writing, why don't you just hook a bluetooth keyboard? Then with some shortcuts to jump by whole words/start-end of line/etc, you can fly, as you would on a laptop.

avn2109 2y ago
> "Maybe you're too fussy?" I agree with the parent. "You're holding it wrong." /s
widowlark 2y ago
I would like to better understand your mentality. Every Apple article I read has comments like yours, essentially saying "It works on my machine, its a YOU (the struggling users) problem". Do you genuinely believe your response is helpful? Just like the OC, I too have noticed the atrocious editing and word manipulation in iOS and, just like OC, I have been text editing for my entire life. iOS is objectively bad at it, in many specific ways. The only way to improve it is for us to be honest about how it can be better and go from there. Coping with the issues as if they dont even exist is not a good path forward.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >Every Apple article I read has comments like yours, essentially saying "It works on my machine, its a YOU (the struggling users) problem". Rather, I'm saying: "it works, period" (on all machines). The OC said it himself: "everyone overlooks it". Perhaps because it's not really there for them, and you're just more fussy ones? >Do you genuinely believe your response is helpful? Do you genuinely believe that any complain is legitimate? The purpose of my comment wasn't to help with it (since I don't consider it broken): it was to counter the idea that "editing text is horrifically broken". >iOS is objectively bad at it, in many specific ways. If it was "objectively bad" I and the other commenter wouldn't be able to refuse it, nor would "everyone overlook it".

baubino 2y ago

I write a lot (several thousand words per day) and even though I love the convenience of writing and editing on my iphone and ipad, it’s become clear in the last couple of years that if I want to write efficiently, I have to do it on my desktop. Text editing (for writing, not coding) has gotten significantly worse in iOS over the last 2-3 years, especially with long documents. I’m surprised that others haven’t noticed this.

gumby 2y ago
Don’t worry, plenty of us have. Surely a gajillion Apple employees have too. Crazy
- bogwog 2y ago
  > Crazy One of the perks of lock-in is that you don't have to stress over every defect in your product.
  - gumby 2y ago
    Since there are a lot of Android and Windows devices out there, and the top applications are multiplatform (Whatsapp, FB, snapchat, much less wikipedia, google search and such) I'm not sure how much lock in there really is. Nerds like us who care about running code on our machines are really the minority. Just look how little volume and revenue Apple gets from the mac (if they were run like most businesses they would have sold off or shut down the mac business long ago)
    - bogwog 2y ago
      > I'm not sure how much lock in there really is. All the big tech companies are guilty of illegally suppressing competition in various ways, including locking customers into their platforms through various means. But Apple? Nobody goes as hard as Apple does with their lock-in strategies. I personally like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I'm not going to assume you're just being ignorant because you love Apple. Instead, I'm curious to know what makes you doubt that lock-in isn't their entire business model? For example, in what universe would iCloud (as it exists today) succeed if customers could actually choose an alternate cloud storage provider for their iPhone/iPad with the same level of system integration?

thih9 2y ago

> Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words. It's agonizing once you think about it, How would you implement it instead?

gumby 2y ago

> editing text is horrifically broken, has been since the first iPhone came out. IIRC editing text was barely even possible when the phone first came out. No cut/paste! I think it arrived in the same software release as the app store.

dkdbejwi383 2y ago

Just trying to place the caret anywhere other than the end of the input field is guaranteed to cause frustration. I frequently give up on writing things on my phone, saving them either for when I am at a computer with a real keyboard, or just not at all in many cases.

cmwright 2y ago
Still not great, but do you know about the spacebar trick? Anywhere the keyboard is open in iOS or iPadOS, press and hold the spacebar. The keyboard is now a trackpad and you can easily move the cursor. Incredibly bad discoverability but has been a big qol improvement for me.

knallfrosch 2y ago

It works fine on Android and the rare thin letter I can't catch, I simply backspace and write again. Suboptimal, but works within seconds. iPhone however? I've given up on the sub-word level. And it's amazing because they could simply copy Androids logic.

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NayamAmarshe 2y ago

Text editing on iPhones is so not ideal! Why is it so hard to edit words, put punctuations and copy-paste text? Android is lightyears ahead in the game.

FredPret 2y ago

I noticed when I moved from Android to iPhone years ago that placing the cursor is really hard. On Android I barely noticed doing it.

varispeed 2y ago

Reason why I don't use Apple mobile devices - the usability is worse than poor. So many convoluted things to do basic stuff.

bobbob1921 2y ago

This is absolutely correct, the text selecting/editing behavior on iOS 17 is unbearable. I remember reading a review or watching a video where someone said this is the type of problem that if Steve Jobs was still around would not exist after one or two minor updates, and I agree. Its as if there aren’t real people at Apple actually using and testing what they release (although I know that’s not the case) For now my work around is long pressing the spacebar to get the cursor to where you want. :(