Posted by evanb 10 hours ago
I gave up on using an iPad for computer things about two years ago. Too many weird iOS limitations; no support for virtualization (despite their chips being virt-capable); multitasking still being awkward, especially with Stage Manager. It's not for lack of trying either; I gave it three goes before throwing the towel in.
On a somewhat related note, I'm afraid of upgrading to macOS 27 for similar "something I depend on is horribly broken now" reasons. There's always been this fear just after a new macOS release, but with how hard Apple is pushing Siri AI, I'm quite scared of what limitations they've imposed in servicing this goal.
> Essentially, you had to swipe up as though going to the home screen, then tap on the app you wanted in the dock, and that app would take over the external display if it had a presentation mode. This was weird and hard to understand, but Apple’s solution is to just make it so that whatever is the most recently tapped app takes over, which is much, much worse.
Some apps, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, only enter "presenter mode" and take over the external AirPlay screen on explicit user action.
Other apps, like Notability, will automatically enter "presenter mode" and take over the external display if they detect a secondary display without explicit user action, even when it is not the only app on screen. You can then turn off this mode if you would like by going into the menus.
AirPlay calls itself "screen mirroring" in the Apple menus, and I can say with confidence from talking to the average teacher in the building that they expect it to mirror their screen. Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user will match the naïve user's expectations.
Apps like Notability that take over the entire AirPlay session without explicit interaction and without being the only app on screen break the naïve user's expectations of display mirroring. Multiple teachers have asked me why their calculator app (for example) does not show up on the Airplay display when they're using Notability.
> As for what the behavior should be, I’m not a developer, but here’s a proposal: if you’re using an app that is in presenter mode (e.g., PowerPoint playing a presentation, or a GoodNotes document open), it should always get precedence on the external display, until that presentation gets stopped, the document is closed, or the app is quit. Period.
I understand and even share the author's concerns, but I think the new compromise—only the active app can take over external displays—makes sense as a default because it matches the average user's expectations of AirPlay. The old method had major benefits and some annoyances, and in my opinion it should still be an option for a background app to control the external display if the user explicitly wants it or has enabled some toggle.
Apple did not handle the 26-27 transition well at all, and this really threw me the first time it came up. (I did not have the option to not update my employer's iPad, so I've been on 27 since release.) There should be a way to have a second app (secretly) open and focused while you present only from app #1, but I think the new default is better.
I used to be able to connect using a lightning-to-VGA/HDMI dongle, draw in an app like Goodnotes, and share+record that view. Sometime in 2018 or 19, they disabled this. The workflow I ended up figuring out involves connecting the iPad to a Mac via a lightning-to-usbc cable, starting a new movie (not screen recording!) through QuickTime, and selecting the iPad as a source. Then, you can share the view of the screen to an external display with acceptable latency and the ability to record the session. Be sure to select a mic, too, when you do this, otherwise the recording won’t have any audio. For some reason, it doesn’t start recording out of the default mic by default when selecting the iPad for the screen…
That’s a “iPad+adapter+OS” stack changed to “iPad+Mac+cable+QuickTime w/ tricky options” stack. If you’re one of the unfortunate souls owning a Mac w/o an HDMI port, throw an extra display adapter in there for Chaos’s sake.
It’s mind blowing how such a common workflow has become so obscured by arbitrary restrictions to OS functionality with no clear purpose.
Or you can use Zoom or likes of it and connect to it from ipad and share screen.
That actually has lower latency than quicktime thing you mentioned
It's almost unusable I can't believe it passed QA _and_ is still not fixed.
Basically it's anything but "just works". It's still an extremely nice general purpose machine.
Oh, forgot. Spotlight takes over a second to autocomplete sometimes. Everything but apps is disabled from the settings menu for it, and I exclusively use it to launch (or bring back in focus, cause... "alt-tab") applications. Super annoying.
MacOS 27 has made adding an AirPlay display a chore, it's gone from the setting panel and now in the quick settings on the top right. Took me forever to figure that one out.
My iPad with a faster chip than my MacBook Pro can't do the most basic computer things even though the form factor is what I want from a modern computer.
> I rely heavily on writing on handouts from my iPad, projected via AirPlay to an external screen that my students can see. When I’m doing this, my iPad is also doing many other things: controlling a PowerPoint presentation on my Mac, showing me notes that I’ve taken on points I want to mention and students I want to call on, and showing me the results of polls before I reveal them to the class.
That's not a crippled OS. And he's using it professionally so "Pro" doesn't seem inappropriate. The way the author describes what they're doing, it's difficult to see a laptop replacing it.
And I think the broader question is “is this functionality worth $1000 to the person using it”, the answer is yes and the specific grade of CPU inside the machine doesn’t have a ton of bearing on that.
The broader question is "is a desktop grade processor sold with a "pro" moniker being able to perform some basic PowerPoint and screensharing worth the $1000 asking price?"
Just this past weekend, just for fun and for recreational programming purposes, I tinkered with Termux on my Samsung S9 FE tablet until I got a full-fledged XFCE window environment running. It uses Termux:X11, which is a stand-alone APK that functions as an X server client, and the Termux app running an X server. So I can seamlessly use apps installed on the tablet as Android apps (such as Brave browser) with terminal sessions in Termux (essentially the "TTY" layer) and other in a full-fat terminal emulator within XFCE (in my case I really like Alacritty) to do web development (serving stuff to http://localhost:8000) or desktop graphics/game programming that's easily transferrable to my other machines because it's written in a portable scripting language like Lua and Love2D.
I got it all working the way I like over the course of a single weekend of not-particularly-focused or effortful hobby-grade tinkering.
And not a single part of this would even be possible if I was trying to do it on an iPad, despite the iPad having like 10x the compute power of my Android tablet.
Apple spends a huge amount of effort maintaining two different operating systems for what is pretty much the same machine under the hood. Don’t be naive and try to rationalize their bad behavior. They clearly just want to maintain their lucrative software distribution monopoly.
Gaming? It's complicated for them as well and I have the impression they also hate gamers.
Video editing? Maybe, but what does the latest CPU brings on the table for that compared to the other ones?
Office tools? The situation looks as miserable as programmers.
3D modeling? Maya3d/Blender/... aren't available and even if it would be, Apple would likely ban plugins, making it useless.
AI tools? Too locked down to work.
And especially given that the very cheapest iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is not $1000 but $1,498 (and that’s with 256GB, which is a crippling size of storage for a device that you have any intentions of using for serious work - even on my phone I’m constantly regretting that storage choice).
Maybe you just have a lot more money than me though :D
Even for photo/video editing, why not use a Mac mini with the same (!) CPU and proper cooling? An iPad doesn't even have a fan, so surely the CPU will throttle.
"A glorified $1000 YouTube machine" is a pretty accurate description of an iPad LMAO
It certainly lets you spawn threads. What it doesn't let you do is spawn processes (which blocks what a typical IDE would like to do, as well as things like the Chrome sandboxing model)
You wouldn’t use a Web TV and then get frustrated when you lose your magnum opus that you’d been working on the last three years.
What is serious computing? There are some things where I expect to have to be at my desk for hours to get them done and then a phone/tablet is worse. However there are also a lot of things better done when not at a desk and a laptop/desktop is worse.
Case in point: authoring academic papers. If you have a local or self-hosted Zotero collection, you will want to cite them. Any desktop platform allows you to use [word processor of choice] and Zotero together fairly seamlessly.
This is a big kludge on iPadOS where you keep switching back and forth between Pages/Word and Zotero to paste in a citation key, which then makes it untenable long-term because the attention break is too great.
Like, even as simple as positioning windows on the screen. On a Mac, you don’t need to ask how, you just drag and size them where you want. On an iPad, even with Magic Keyboard and trackpad, same basic input devices, it requires a bunch of learning to vaguely approximate what every Mac user has been doing for 42 years. And until like 1 year ago, there weren’t even window-like things, only weird alternative paradigms to learn and accept.