“The iPad Pro’s last frontier is adding a trackpad to the Smart Keyboard,” Jean-Louis Gassée writes for Monday Note.
“Of course, if Apple does add a trackpad, Microsoft execs and users will say that they were right all along,” Gassée writes. “And perhaps they were: They had the right idea but the difference is in the implementation.”
Gassée writes, “On the Microsoft side, we see tablet features grafted onto a legacy operating system that’s even more riddled with old age issues than OS X.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Jean-Louis spills lots of bits wishing for a trackpad on his iPad when he already has a trackpad on his iPad!
This works for all iPads with iOS 9 and later: Turn your keyboard into a trackpad. Touch and hold the keyboard with two fingers until it turns light gray. Drag around the keyboard to position the insertion point. Lift, then touch and hold with two fingers to reveal the drag points. Move your fingers to select text. Tap with two fingers to select a word. Double-tap with two fingers to select a sentence. Tap three times with two fingers to select a paragraph.
The iPad Pro is not meant for older generations. Unless they are willing to completely unlearn and let go of old tricks and learn new ones. That’s very tough to do for some. Those are the people who ask questions like “Where my physical trackpad to go with my physical keyboard?”, “Is it a sketch pad?”, “Is it a laptop replacement?” iPad Pro and iOS are really for the young and for future generations. It is the future. Until the next paradigm shift, perhaps decades away, Multi-touch will be how most people compute, not with physical keyboards, mice, cursors, exposed file systems, etc.
MacDailyNews Note: Today is Washington’s Birthday in the U.S.A., a federal holiday and, as such, the U.S. markets are closed for the day. We will resume our normal posting schedule tomorrow.
He wants a trackpad on the smart keyboard (the physical one), not the on-screen keyboard.
Hey MDN, when a republican finally gets back into the White House (2024?) will you go back to calling the holiday President’s Day?
Why would MDN call today anything other than what it is?
The United States federal holiday today is Washington’s Birthday, not “President’s Day.”
As long as they continue to call it that no matter who is in office, I don’t see a problem with it.
MDN always has called it Washington’s Birthday, correctly, since the site’s inception, so I assume they’ll continue to do so as long as the federal holiday remains “Washington’s Birthday.”
Exactly.
Ipad does have a trackpad… Try tow fingers on the keyboard Gassee
So does iphone through 3d touch .
iPad with a keyboard? Poor man’s MacBook, I guess.
Absolutely right. There should be trackpad/mouse options. Why?
Because when you tilt the iPad up with a keyboard it’s a real pain (literally) to hold and suspend your arm and hand to interact with the screen.
I don’t know why this is so hard to understand. The issue is with using the Smart Keyboard. It would be much better if it had trackpad functionality.
“The iPad Pro is not meant for older generations. Unless they are willing to completely unlearn and let go of old tricks and learn new ones.”
No, MDN’s take is a “for the masses” point of view, which is very different from Gassée’s perspective. What we’re talking about here is not an “age” thing, but rather whether one is using an iPad professionally or not. Yes, it is being used heavily in the design-related fields, but Gassée is looking at things from a general professional perspective.
There’s no reason why Apple can’t satisfy both realms of activity with the iPad/iOS ecosystem, it can use KISS for the masses, but a click away is a powerful computing device for professional use… just like the Mac.
Surely a Trackpad, to be really useful, would require some kind of mouse pointer on screen, other wise the only useful thing it can do (as far as I can see) is move the cursor in a text field.
I think the current implementation is fantastic… there when you need it, all other times hidden.
The lack of a trackpad means that the iPad is lxusy for editing text.
And, no, the onboard “keyboard trackpad” doesn’t help: Yes you can select text from the cursor position, but you can’t move the cursor somewhere else. For instance if I want to fix the word “lxusy” I can’t easily position the cursor to do so from this point in my post…
… And being able to position it accurately depends, to some degree, on the specific app for some reason.
Besides, iOS mail is barely functional and OS/X mail has silly limitations that should have been addressed years ago: try sorting a large mailbox so that unread mail appears first. You will find you get a pile of unread mail at the start, but if you exceed the sort record count hard coded into Mail, you will find a mix of read and unread messages at the end of your mailbox.
Yes, El-Capitan brings welcome stability but it didn’t fix everything: Mail on my MacBook often cannot recover from a lid close and requires a reboot. Similarly, the MacBook loses its connection to the Mac-Pro’s USB printer when it sleeps – it will often reconnect after some random interval, but that can be hours… Usually I have to reboot the MacBook to force queued print jobs to print.
Many of us have never forgiven Apple for dumbing down Pages and Numbers forcing many of us to subscribe to Office365. iCloud remains unusable except for passwords and app synchronisation (1password for instance). IBooks still doesn’t sync between my Macs so my PDF’s are now in OneDrive instead and my books are in Kindle, from Amazon’s bookstore rather than Apple’s.
These are the things that annoy and Apple are so focused on iOS that they are forgetting that it is their Mac users who have evangelised Apple.
I recently added parallels and Win10 to my MacPro after 14 years of Apple purity. I only intended to use it for a trading app which is only available for Windows. But the Win version of Excel is much more powerful than the Mac version, and Access ships with Win Office but not Mac Office. Win10 is a big beast, but it serves to demonstrate why businesses still prefer Windows. Maybe IBM can shift the goalposts here. Let’s hope so.
Now if the internal keyboard actually worked at the same time as the Apple iPad keyboard/case, I would be in business. Please fix this Apple.
http://www.gottabemobile.com/2016/02/07/56-essential-ipad-pro-keyboard-shortcuts-you-need-to-know/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Gottabemobile+%28GottaBeMobile%29
Thanks for the shortcuts. Some are useful however is does not solve the problem of using the external keyboard concurrently with the internal touch keyboard.