Rui Carmo
Matt Gemmell takes us on a somewhat nostalgic journey through the Apple ecosystem, highlighting both enduring strengths and lingering quirks of both the iPad and the Mac, and even as I was reading it on my iPad, I couldn’t help but nod along with his observations.
You see, the iPad’s attrition has also been getting to me lately–as a case in point, I haven’t used my iPad Pro for anything other than reading and annotating PDFs in months, and that was before I, too, sort of adopted the Supernote platform as a way to capture my thoughts and early drafts.
I have the excuse of (literally) using all the platforms, but even as I type this on my Mac thanks to effortless Reading List syncing, a lovely keyboard and my grand pair of huge displays, I can’t help but feel that the iPad has been left to languish in a sort of limbo.
At this point, and after my own multi-year stint of trying to use an iPad as a primary device I can’t help but agree with Matt’s assessment that the iPad is a product for which Apple has no clear product vision.
Like him, I would not call it a dead end–especially since I still use my iPad mini daily, several times per day. But I feel no great motivation to dig out the iPad Pro–at this point, I would rather Apple made a 10” device that runs macOS. Heck, bring back the 12” MacBook with an M-series chip, and I will buy one on the spot.
Even though I am biased in preferring what is clearly the runt of the litter, I’m starting to think that the larger iPads risk becoming heralds of a future that never quite materialized, and it is entirely Apple’s fault (and their failure) that iPadOS is such a buggy mess instead of showing any sort of steady improvement.
It kind of reminds me of the Newton, really.