Yes, of course you can edit photos on the iPad! Photoshop isn’t the only software for editing photos. And using a different program to do the same thing isn’t “working around the limitations of the platform”.
Yeah, tapping with two fingers and dragging is such a burden!
If you’re using the iPad for work, what do you think is taking up so much storage? I have literally hundreds of full-resolution Procreate projects on my iPad, and altogether they take up less than 16GB of storage. Depending on your use case, 64GB can be plenty.
And again, you only “need the keyboard case” if you’re focused on making the iPad into a laptop. But if you really need an external keyboard, the iPad Pro already works with any Bluetooth keyboard, so you don’t need to spend $199.
It’s almost like they are two separate devices with different benefits and different drawbacks!
Yes, one is a laptop and one is a tablet. If you try to make one fit the uses of the other, you’re gonna have a bad time.
No, if you get a tablet and your goal is “I want to make this work exactly like a laptop”, then you’re going to complain about, “Oh this keyboard doesn’t have a backlight and I don’t have a mouse cursor and I can’t directly manipulate the filesystem”, because you’re focusing on the interface and not the actual tasks.
But if you actually focus on what you want to do, you’ll be fine.
Yeah, if you go to the effort to work around the limitations of the platform and feel that effort is worthwhile, you can do that. Or you can just use a laptop.
Good lord this is the dumbest argument ever. Tablets have been around for 10 years, and tablets being positioned as PC replacements for like 4 or 5. I think people have figured out what they want to use them for.
They are not limitations to most people. But sure, if you want all the drawbacks of a device that is heavier, has worse battery life, a worse display, no pen input, less portable, costs more, and has a non-detachable keyboard, then you can accomplish goals like “typing on a keyboard with a backlight” and “moving files around”.
I would agree with that, as most people are very much casual users. Like I said earlier, when people ask me to recommend a computer for their auntie, I tell them to get a chromebook or iPad.
Given very high pricing, that wouldn’t be the new 2018 iPad, though.
Yeah, I should have just ended with this:
And when people ask me to recommend a computer for high-end photo editing or illustration, I tell them to get an iPad Pro. But I guess you consider professional photographers and artists to be “casual users”.
I’m not a professional photographer so I can’t say from personal experience but from what I’ve heard they still use laptops, in addition to iPads in the field.
I can tell you’re not a professional photographer by your “You’re gonna edit photos on an iPad?” comment, when that is precisely the type of operation that the iPad is perfect for.
Yeah, it takes time to get past their old ideas that they have to manipulate the file system or use a mouse in order to be “productive”. It took people a while to accept GUIs too.
Like I said, I heard that pro photographers take iPads in the field, but they also have laptops. I’m sure there are some that go iPad-only, just like there are some that skip the tablet entirely and lug their laptops around.
I’m not a photographer, but I do absolutely need the filesystem and a quick way to manipulate text. Could I work on an iPad? Sure. It would just be slower and annoying.
It’s like watching a pedantry marathon.
Yes you can use an iPad for “real” work. Just like you can use a 20 year old Athlon for real work.
You can also type a book with one hand, or play FPS games with your eyes closed. You could write the Great American Novel on your phone. This doesn’t mean you should.
But yes with patience for inefficiency you can make iPads do a lot of things. And maybe if the iPad is the only computing device (by choice or not) you have those inefficiencies seem far less important.
You are completing missing the point. Am I going to heavily edit photos or writings? No. Am I going to stop for a coffee to work on a paper, check photos I took, etc? Yes. It’s a laptop replacement, not a computer replacement. They work together.
And I don’t think you understand that most people don’t need to access the filesystem. not because they are “casual users”, but because they’re not attached to a legacy way of using a computer. You’re like a guy who owns a pickup truck, and you think that everyone else is a “casual driver” if they can’t haul concrete every day.
Actually, you remind me of a Linux user I used to know, who would brag about how he recompiled his kernel to save 150K of memory, and how much more efficient his computer was as a result. Some people want to tinker with things, and some people just want to get work done. So yeah, it’s great that you can spend all the live long day moving files around on your laptop. I think that most people would just prefer not to worry about that, and have an OS that handles that for them.
I disagree with that analogy. A 20-year-old Athlon is not superior to a modern computer in any way. Typing with one hand is never faster than using two hands. Playing an FPS with your eyes closed is never superior to playing with your eyes open. But for some things—for example, digital painting—an iPad is absolutely superior to a laptop.
I don’t disagree with your point, but I actually do expect Apple to relent and add access to a file system (by choice) and mouse support to the iPad Pro sooner or later. It’s pretty much the last step and they’ve been moving incrementally over the years.
In fact, now that it has USB-C, adding those two things could turn an iPad Pro into a viable PC/laptop replacement for a lot of people. Just plug it into a dock with monitor/keyboard/mouse/external storage and go to town.
So, here’s the problem I have with most of the arguments. You don’t do a thing, but think doing the thing would suck on an interface you don’t really like or understand. I recently had to edit a photo, and not a crop adjust a slider edit. For a presentation, I needed to mimic me having a black eye. I opened the image on my iPad in Affinity, used the burn tool and the Pencil and it was very intuitive. A lot of people doing a lot of retouching use Cintiq tablets for this. Affinity Photo on iPad can handle these well. Working with adjustment layers, masks, alpha channels and the like is better with a stylus on glass.
How deep down into the file system do you really need to go, though for most tasks? The Files app on the iOS isn’t bad. It needs improvements like tabbed browsing and some better ways of handling changes to lots of files. That said, it’s rare I need to grab a ton of files and rename them in specific ways.
If we accept people using iPads for writing use external keyboards, selecting text using the screen or Pencil isn’t the best way. There are keyboard commands for selecting lines, words, paragraphs. That makes it pretty damn easy to grab lots of text.
Stuss, I respect a lot of your hardware knowledge, and have made purchases based on your recommendation, but it’s clear to me you haven’t really tried to use an iPad for these tasks and are just projecting, or haven’t taken the time to learn how the iPad does things.
Too often these discussions focus on what the iPad can’t do, and that’s fair to a point. One MacRumors thread I was on, one poster was dismissive of the iPad for “reasons.” By the time we got him to say what he felt he needed, even a 15" MacBook wouldn’t work by the time you added on the two external monitors et a. he needed. I can’t even do my job natively on macOS because we are a heavy Windows shop, but that doesn’t make a Mac a toy for “real work.”
All these things are are tools that do different jobs to different abilities. If I am headed out to do some writing, drawing, photo editing, the iPad is the tool I bring. If I need the Unix tools, or an app I don’t have on the iPad, I bring my Mac.
I am not sure if I mentioned it here, or on MR, but it’s clear to me this year’s iPad Pro is paying the price for planned features being moved to iOS 13. This is too powerful a device, and USB-C opens up too many doors that iOS 12 still keeps closed.
I traveled without a laptop plenty of times. I found it deeply annoying when I had to actually work on the damn thing. Responding to a couple emails, no problem. But serious work sucked.
@LeeAbe: Many people don’t have desktop computers these days. In fact, really only gamers need one. So replacing a laptop means that it’s your primary device. And that’s OK if you’re a casual user.
If you use an iPad as your primary device, you’re either a casual user or you managed to work around the limitations inherent in the platform. Which is what I’ve been saying the whole time.