iPad Only Frustrations

With the release of Apple’s latest iPad Pro I’ve been reading a lot of articles and blog posts where people are still attempting to ditch their laptops and make the move. For the past few years they all read the same to me and come to the same conclusion.

Going iPad only is great if you aren’t a developer, and if you are willing to change your workflow.

That’s all fine but it isn’t honest either. The people writing these posts are typically tech savvy and they know how to workaround the limitations. It’s not that easy if you aren’t.

My wife is an example of the other category. She only uses two devices, an iPhone and an iPad. She doesn’t use any accessories like an external keyboard and uses huge and awful bullet proof cases. In it the wonderful feel and beauty of the devices are gone.

All that aside she constantly has to come to me to figure out workarounds over common tasks. Just tonight she was attempting to fill out an agreement form for a local business so we could reserve a birthday party. The form was uploaded and online as a .docx and it was supposed to be editable, but it wasn’t. So now I’m going to have to figure out how to get her a version of it with all the information filled out so it can be emailed back.

Another thing that is constantly annoying is the on screen keyboard and trying to position the cursor, trying to select text for copying, and just general movement that is easy on a laptop.

Almost every day she hits little stuff like that and that leads to a frustrating experience. I know that Apple isn’t really at fault here because both of these is really related to developers and site owners not thinking about their end users. I’m confident in a few years these little things will be worked out and all this will be considered the growing pains.

I know this post is me pointing out little annoyances but I want to leave on a positive note and say how much better the personal computer experience is now with an iPad. I really appreciate the sandbox and the safety that comes with it. I don’t have to really worry about viruses, offering crazy tech support to my extended family, and how easy it is to pick up and use.

Just keep in mind that it’s fashionable to write about switching totally to an iPad, and for technically savvy users that aren’t developers I would be all in on it. I hope one day I can join this crowd and do everything it does now with the addition of web development.