The frustrating thing about the iPad is that I constantly feel that I need to be buying into a philosophy. There’s rarely a good *reason* for why I can’t do something other than me “not getting what the iPad is about”. This never happens with the Mac or the *iPhone*.
The limitations of the iPhone feel earned due to the nature of the device. You can get away with a lot because it feels amazing that I can get this much done in this form factor to begin with. But the iPad form factor is basically the same as a laptop, so it deserves no slack.
Especially with keyboard support, every time I want to do something and can’t it just feels completely arbitrary. And now Apple has proven they’ve been crying wolf all along: eventually the iPad always ends up working more and more like a laptop, so why do I have to wait now?
The worst part is that it’s not even limited to “laptop-like” tasks, the iPad is now a worse tablet with the Magic Keyboard. It kind of sucks for typing in bed compared to the software keyboard, and it’s unusable for reading since it doesn’t flip around like a true cover.
This again feels arbitrary: I just paid $350 for a cover that doesn’t fully open, why? Because of a staunch position that the keyboard needs to live in this weird add-on component and thus necessarily never fit quite right.
The iPad is the device I feel most “separate” or “disconnected” from, like I’m talking to it through a translator or something. I don’t feel like I’m directly manipulating the objects on the screen, which is ironic given what touch aims to be.
The “windows” are a great example of this. There’s some bizarre gestures and highly structured but hard to understand tiling mechanism that makes me feel like I’m shoving what I want to see into a couple predefined boxes. It doesn’t feel “fun” or “fluid” at all.
Picture-in-picture is another great example. It’s still a pain in the ass to have background video content on the iPad. It’s something apps have to explicitly support as opposed to the escape hatch of just fucking moving a window to the corner that always exists in macOS.
There’s this funnel every minor UX advancement has to go through before I’m allowed to have it. Twitter stream on the side? Wait 7 years for “multi-tasking support”. Propping iPad up at a *good* angle? Pay $350 for a cover that prevents you from using it like a book anymore.
If you made a16” MacBook Pro that could only run one app at a time, it would be mercilessly criticized, not hailed as a conceptual revolution. But what’s different here? The fact that it has touch? What’s that got to do with anything? There’s no logic to it, just boiling the frog
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