You can do real work on an iPad, so stop claiming otherwise
Now iPadOS 15 has appeared, it’s a crushing disappointment to those people who enjoy being crushingly disappointed when Apple doesn’t do precisely what they want. And it’s not like I don’t have frustrations with the iPad myself. For years, I’ve banged on about wanting full external display support, the dream being a fully modular computing experience that could ‘be’ tablet, laptop or desktop within relevant contexts. But as I wrote for Wired, this is not Apple’s strategy. The company isn’t seeking to replace laptops with iPads, but to “finesse the transition between its platforms, with all your hardware and software working together”.
In a sense, iPad still exists where it was originally positioned, between a smartphone and a laptop. It’s just this definition has expanded from the device’s originally fairly limited scope. But even from day one, it was a superior device for some tasks—without that, it wouldn’t have had any reason to exist. Today, the ambition of app creators has helped the platform evolve into a primary device for a wider range of users, including some illustrators and video editors on the move.
It’s with this in mind that I find increasing frustration in commentators who should know better slamming the iPad for not having “real apps” to do “real work”. It’s like the conversation hasn’t moved on in a decade, despite the platform and its capabilities being far beyond what was possible with the original iPad. And while I do understand some people are irked they can’t get Final Cut on their iPad, I’ve also watched video folks scythe through 4K edits on LumaFusion. Elsewhere, I’ve talked with visual designers using Affinity apps and illustrators working with Procreate. Writers? Plenty tap away on an iPad with the likes of Ulysses and Scrivener. Musicians? There are tons of superb synths, virtual instruments and DAWs for the system, many of which work brilliantly, and most of which cost a fraction of their desktop counterparts or equivalents.
Could Apple do more? Sure. But is iPad somehow deficient? I don’t think so, unless your requirements are very specific—or your real aim is screaming that iPad is doomed at the top of your lungs, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Is anyone claiming that you can’t do real work on an iPad? Taken literally, that claim is ludicrous, so anyone making that claim is completely out of touch with anything remotely resembling actual reality.
I think the actual problem that reasonable people are bringing up (and one that I agree with) is that the vast majority of people simply can’t replace their desktop PC with an iPad, even though the work they do could technically easily be done on an iPad. The iPad is fast enough, it has a keyboard, a touchscreen, a pen, enough storage space, even mouse input. And, as you point out, apps to do professional work do exist on the iPad.
The reason why most people can’t replace their PC with an iPad is that iPadOS (still) makes a typical workflow, which often involves working with multiple different (shared) files, in different apps, moving data across apps, incredibly inconvenient.
I know people who tried to use an iPad for work, kind of got it working for a while, and then switched back to a Mac or PC because that was much more convenient. At this point, I don’t personally (i.e. in real life) know a single person who is still using an iPad for anything other than entertainment, and responding to emails once in a while.
That’s a problem, the fact that for most people, an ancient operating system is more convenient than one designed pretty recently.
So I think that it is fair to say that the iPad *is* somehow deficient.
If you think about what happened here, it’s actually kind of astonishing.
At this point, it’s reasonable to say that the operating systems we use have grown increasingly out of touch with people’s needs. We’re still essentially using operating systems that were designed for non-networked computers that had a few megabytes of storage space that were used to locally store a few dozen files that one person worked on.
Something new is needed, something that is built to work with the Internet, something that is built to work with large numbers of files, files that are often shared with collaborators across the world. Something that is much more secure, and protects users from modern threats, like ransomware.
After pioneering desktop computing, and basically inventing the user interface we now all use, Apple had the opportunity to invent what that “something new” is. That was clearly their goal with the iPad, that’s how Steve Jobs introduced the device, as a replacement for PCs for most people.
Do you think they’ve succeeded? I don’t think so.
That doesn’t mean that the iPad is a failure. It’s clearly a success. But I think it should be so much more. And I think we should criticize it, because that’s the way to make progress.
Nice to see a comment from you, Lukas — always a pleasure (genuinely)!
And, yes, I’m still seeing a lot of people dismissing the platform as a whole and claiming you cannot do “real work” on an iPad, largely on the basis of their own personal and very specific requirements.
I agree that there are shortcomings, although I’m unconvinced aping a desktop-style windowing model is going to fix them. And it’s hard to know truly what the blockers are. Most people I work with have effective lock-in with Office or Google Docs. The latter is of course terrible on iPad (unless you use Safari), but the actual process of work is barely any different from on the desktop.
For those juggling a number of local files, across a range of apps, things become more of an issue. There, the iPad’s deficiency primarily lies in Apple’s reluctance to open up Files rather than have documents live inside apps and then be copied across rather than moved — always a grave error.
That said, I know plenty of people using iPads as their primary platforms. Perhaps it’s a niche platform for consumption and creativity — something for videos and making videos, for reading and writing the books people read. Maybe Apple dropped the ball with the middle ground — basic work. (It’s certainly performing poorly in education these days, after the initial excitement faded.)
In a sense, that is — as per my recent Wired pieces — how I read Steve Jobs’s original framing of the device and its subsequent expansion. It wasn’t a replacement for everyone, but a device that had to do some things better to justify its existence. Since those days, it has expanded its scope, albeit in a fairly random manner, driven in part by the ambitions of developers and the nature of people who use Apple products.
I’m not sure that makes it deficient in a global sense, but in specific use cases — and that’s my general point with many of these pieces. That’s not to say there’s no room for criticism, however; I agree with a lot of your points. But then you’re not someone banging on with outrageous claims on YouTube or elsewhere, in a desperate attempt to get views and clicks!
“although I’m unconvinced aping a desktop-style windowing model is going to fix them”
I’m definitely not arguing for that. Overlapping windows are terrible, particularly on the Mac, where you have to use third-party tools to get any kind of semblance of control over your windows. The window paradigm we use on desktop PCs was designed for single-tasking Macs in the early 80s, where you typically had at most three or four windows open at a time, and is completely inappropriate for how we use computers today. Each app individually adding its own interpretation of tabs to work around these issues only compounds the problem.
Likewise, I don’t think that desktop operating systems are good at managing files. The Finder was originally designed to manage 1.4 megabytes worth of files at a time, and it really hasn’t improved much since then, other than getting vastly better search (which thankfully serves as a good workaround for most of its file management issues).
In both of these cases, while desktop operating systems aren’t what I would call “good”, they *are* flexible enough to allow people to easily do things like take a Word file and two JPGs, ZIP them into a single file, and send the ZIP to their school’s newsletter. Or take a bunch of pictures of stuff that has to be repaired in their flat, select and store a few of them into a Dropbox folder, crop or rotate some a bit, and then send the URL to the Dropbox folder in an email.
These things are *possible* on iOS, but I’d much rather do them on a Mac. These are not complex tasks, they’re the kinds of tasks most people do pretty regularly, and I think they should be easier on an iPad than on a Mac, not harder.