Ben Brooks, writing for The Brooks Review:
An astonishing amount of people right now are moving — in one way or another — to iOS as a full time computing platform. Perhaps not ditching the Mac completely, but at the very least declaring iOS ready for most of their work. And it’s not just writers, I’ve been seeing some people who do seriously heavy duty work moving to the likes of the iPad Pro and other iOS devices.
It’d be interesting to see a scientific survey to get a sense of how deep this runs. Are these early adopters? Or is this a true trending change in user behavior?
On a Mac you have to decide if your window is going to be full screen or not. If it is full screen, is it full screen but split with another app, if so by how much? Or is it going to be a window on the desktop, if so where and how large? Repeat that for every app, and a lot of your day becomes just managing the size and location of your windows.
With iOS you only get one size on your iPhone, and four sizes on the iPad (full screen, 2/3, half, 1/3). That’s simpler no matter how you slice it. It’s also faster, as you are now spending far less time managing application windows. Spend your time arranging your application windows or spend it getting shit done.
An interesting take. There certainly is a lot of fiddling that goes into using the Mac that I don’t have on my iPhone or iPad. But I do appreciate the power of the Mac’s windowing system combined with a large screen monitor. But I do a lot of graphics design and programming, so I might be an edge case.
The share sheet system in iOS is fantastic as I can take this file right here and send it directly to where I want it to go, without any hiccups or shuffling. The worst experience on iOS is trying to find a file in something like BitTorrent Sync, Dropbox, or the iCloud Drive app. Yuck. I take my file from one app to another, always working on it.
On my Mac I have files I drag out to the desktop, to drag into another app, to export back out of that app, to drag back to another window, to then upload and finally use. It’s madness if you really think about it. On iOS I rarely touch icons representing files, instead I get to where and what I need much faster.
Madness, true, but I’m so good at it now!
My iPad gets warm when I play some games. Otherwise it is just a cool glass slab.
My MacBook: warm. Even more warm with each thing I do. Heat is important, as it can be uncomfortable touching my MacBook, but I’ve never felt that way with my iPad or iPhone. We don’t like warm — warm devices is disconcerting to say the least.
There’s lots more of this. I found this whole post thought provoking. I still live in both worlds, sometimes using OS X and iOS at the same time. I still see iOS as portable consumption, light creation and OS X as power user content creation.
[H/T John Kordyback]
I wish that there was a way to arrange the iPad Pro differently than the Air 2 or Mini 3 that I also have. It’s a different device and I would like some gasp options for tweaking. I don’t want to have root access or even file level access the way I do on my rMBP, but (and I know I’ll get called out but I don’t care) something akin to the Surface would make the Pro infinitely more useful. I hope that iOS 10 or whatever it gets called will give us some options like that.
I’m close to being able to move to iOS for my work. However, I rely heavily on spreadsheets for what I do. Excel is probably good enough, but the input method isn’t. I still need a pointer of some kind to be quick and precise. I also need a large monitor for using spreadsheets. iPad Pro isn’t big enough (resolution is obviously fine, but not the physical size).
Basically what I want is an iOS device I can dock and get a full keyboard, pointer of some kind (prefer mouse but trackpad is also fine), and a large monitor. I don’t need a “PC” per se, nor a Windows 10 hybrid type of device, though it’s appealing. iOS has almost all of what I need. I do a huge portion of my work from it, but not all just yet.
Fortunately the ecosystem is strong. We use Box.com for our cloud storage which makes things fairly seamless between my truck and my iOS device.
iOS is not Mac OS. As such, it seems to me that the only people ready to use iOS full time are writers. The world is more than writers.
As an audio engineer running Pro-Tools, I can’t imagine working on an iOS device for this. So for me, iOS won’t work… at least at the moment. Past that, the ability to move files around in folders in OS X is vitally important to me. Just can’t do that in iOS, where there really isn’t a “file system” that’s available to the user. But fix this issue, and I’d be more interested in exploring iOS as a replacement.
I think the discussion is mislead. The issue with iOS is mainly that there is no pointer device like a mouse or trackpad and that forces the user to work in the same plane as the view. Just I am not made that way. My hands and my view are at an approx 90°C angle.
So if Apple would add a pointer device all would be good with iOS.
Yes, I really hope iOS 10 is an iPad-focused release. I can’t help but feel that some of the sales slump is due to the relative neglect Apple showed the iPad in iOS 6 through 8.
I’m prepared to make the move soon as well, honestly. The iPad Pro + the Logitech Create keyboard would serve as an excellent replacement for my aging MBA.
The iPad Pro and Smart Keyboard are the most amazing Apple devices I’ve ever used. I now use my iPad Pro 80% of the time, iPhone 15%, and iMac 5%.
“On my Mac I have files I drag out to the desktop, to drag into another app, to export back out of that app, to drag back to another window, to then upload and finally use.”
This and a couple of other things make me wonder about him. Who the hell does this? Ever hear of the Open menu in apps? Leave the file where it is, choose File > Open in one app, do what you want, tab to another app, File > Open… boom. The process he outlines feels like he’s deliberately working inefficiently in OS X to highlight a point.
Nope. I’ll use my Macs for working thanks.
It depends on what you mean by writers. I see a lot of people who’s work life is emails, web, Word, and PowerPoint. I guess they “write” all day.
I know a photographer who uses her iPad Pro about 90% of the time now. I know a teacher who uses his most of the time. It’s a good option and gives people more choices. I love my MacBook and it works for me but I certainly won’t be negative about people who enjoy a different computing experience.