“There are plenty of people who have made the iPad their main computer with great success — but I am not one of them, and I don’t think I’ll become one of them in the foreseeable future,” Dieter Bohn writes for The Verge.
“Same goes for Chrome OS and Android. These operating systems are just too limited for me: when I’m annoyed by the way something works, I want to change it better suit my preferences,” Bohn writes. “On Mac and Windows, you can do it. On iOS, Android, and Chrome OS, it’s harder, if not impossible.”
“Anyway, I come not to rag on the iPad, but to praise the Mac. Specifically, the little apps that live in the menubar and make my life easier every day,” Bohn writes. “I’ve already extolled the virtues of Alfred, which I use for keyboard shortcuts, clipboard history, and more. Here, I’d like to talk about everything that’s sitting in my menubar. It’s a lot.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you ever wanted to load up – and wring more out of – your Mac’s menu bar, this article is for you!
The Mac’s malleability is yet another of its great advantages over iPad.
As we wrote back in December 2015:
Imagine an “iOS Pro” mode.
Turn on iOS Pro on your iPad Pro
1. Tap Settings > General, and make sure iOS Pro is turned on.
2. There is no step two.Hey, we can dream, can’t we?
Shouldn’t such a thing already exist? Where would iPad sales be if it did?
MDN nailed it Again! 2 in a row IMO.
Should have been that way from the start, especially because of all the hype.
It pisses me off when I open a webpage on My iPad Pro and a mobile site comes up. That would be problem number 1.
No real access to the file system. Printing is still an exercise in futility. Apple’s obsession with port elimination does not bode well for the future. The DRM locks built in to iOS are also bullshit.
Mac = John Deere tractor
iOS = weed whacker
You can choose to mow your lawn with either tool. Which do you think achieves better results?
There is not and never will be an “iOS Pro”. Putting more bells and whistles on iOS makes it worse for Phone use (the core reason iOS exists) while doing nothing to achieve Mac power.
Those people who call iOS devices a PC replacement are either retired or they are children. iOS is the tightest of walled gardens, designed for consumption of media and lightweight netbook tasks.
Overtures to artists via the poorly designed pencil don’t change the fact that iOS is a small screen, touch-based, locked-down system that pushes subscription computing. The user has to jump through hoops to share data, use alternate non-iOS tools, or even do simple things like manage files among a team. A Mac does all these things with ease in a multi-platform environment.
If Apple wants to continue to be a professional company, it needs to keep its professional tools sharp. Cook has done precisely the opposite, sacrificing future health of Apple for the short term profits of iOS apps and games. Imagine how dynamic Apple would be if it walked and chewed gum at the same time.
… And when your menubar gets too full to show everything, it’s time for the Bartender app. I can’t live without it.
Oh and no. If you want an actual ‘computer’, as opposed to a convenient personal device that does some useful things and happens to run on computer chips, then you CAN’T make an iPad your main computer either. One of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard was:
Tim Cook on iPad Pro: ‘Why would you buy a PC anymore?’
The moment he utter this idiocy, we should have known the Mac was screwed. The guy is NOT a computer whiz/geek. Someone PLEASE wake Tim the hell up. I’m never going back to Windows again. Got that Tim?
Yep, Cook is incompetent
Incompetent and certain, critical aspects of running Apple, we can agree about that. But dumping him into the wide open ‘incompetent’ bin, I don’t agree to that. He’s been brilliant at some things, help bring Apple to the utter APEX of profitability. But he’s no Steve Jobs and Apple requires a lot of Steve Jobs’s kick-in-the-ass entrepreneurial spirit at this exact moment in time.
One thing Botty and I agree upon is that maybe bringing Scott Forstall back to Apple would provide said ass-kicking.
I’d go back to Windows in a heartbeat, if Apple discontinued the Mac and expected me to use an iPad exclusively as my main computer.
hear, hear!
I would go so far as to say that Apple’s iOS distraction and lack of improvement of the Mac has allowed Windows to become — at least for most users — 90% as good as MacOS for about 50% of the cost.
The thought is giving me a headache.
Linux would be my aspirin.
Bartender is, indeed, a must-have. Excellent software.
Mail is crap on the iPad. I rely on rules, smart mailboxes and various archives “onmymac”,
I type a lot. I need a trackpad. Much of the time my finger obscures the cursor…
Safari is a pain on iPad. Memory management I guess. I like to open lots of tabs and I hate the way iPad has to rebuild each tab when you open it.
I use the iPad for Facebook (though it’s currently crashing a lot), reading the news and playing games. Otherwise I use my macs.
And can you download stuff on an iPad? Where does it go? All over the place I guess. I use OneDrive now for pretty much everything but I have no idea if it’s even possible to move something (a PDF for example) into OneDrive on the iPad
When I use the iPad I am always conscious of the compromises. It’s like owning the cheapest model of a car – lots of blanks in the dashboard.
One day Apple will turn the iPad into a Mac. As long as my wireless trackpad works and there is enough processing power and memory I would consider a Mac tablet as a replacement for my MacBook which already has a crap keyboard for serious typing.
Maybe because the iPad is inferior for real work (i.e. anything other than social media, surfing, emailing, simple document creation, and media consumption)? The more they make iOS like Mac OS, the more one has to wonder what the heck they are doing – the Mac already exists, geniuses.
Two things would help me!
1) USB drive support to plugin and mount usb devices like HDs
2) When iPad is plugged into a computer it mounts and shows as your home folder would on OS X. Photos, Contacts, Documents, Voicemail, etc.
apple wants to you spend more money to store all your data in iCloud (which crashed hard today btw, because Apple is all on AWS)…
letting you have file access and hard drives on an iPad is the LAST thing they want…
its all about the benjamins now baby.
Not all of iCloud is on AWS. Apple has their own server farms that handle a portion of the iCloud w/o the AWS layer. If those servers crash its all Apple.
I don’t understand this obsession with getting the iPad to do things that a desktop computer is better at, such as longform document creation.
These devices should be used to complement each other. The iPad should be used for mobile situations in which data entry is the goal. Often times even a portable device such as a laptop simply too awkward to handle a job on the go .
The other you so I would put a touch surface such as the iPad to use for drawing. Now that the Apple Pencil is there it’s even better at that task. In fact, it could even be better angle like an old drafting table with that even larger surface.
I have a maxed out retina 27 imac quad core i7 4 Ggz, 32 GB Ram, 2.5 TB of SSD (internal and external), and an iPad Pro. They compliment each other perfectly. When I’m on the go, or I’m sitting on the couch, I do not want to use mac os. I want to use iOS and I love my 12.9 inch ipad screen. It is wonderful for reading and browsing. When I need to do real hard core work, I’m usually at my desktop.
I can get by 99% of the time with iOS when I’m on the go. Occasionally I need to do something a bit more advanced, so all I do is just JumpDesktop to my iMac, pull out my Swiftpoint Mouse which is paired with my iPad and connect my smart keyboard and it’s as if I’m sitting with a macbook. It is very simple and gets the job done for me. After I complete my work and I need the files on the iPad, I just save to my iCloud drive, and voila, everything just works. The iPad pro is a great compliment with remote desktop.
Amen. Nearly exactly the same situation with me, except the primary system is a Mac Pro (for heavy cad/video processing) and MacBook Pro (most other intensive work). I use the iPad Pro with Astro pad as a drawing tablet for image editing, and almost all of my tasks on a daily basis when on the go (except phone calls on iPhone). And with parallels access (I mention this a lot because it’s terrific) I can work on my Mac Pro anytime I want from anywhere with a data connection.