Review of the 2018 iPad Pro
The sideways logo gets hidden, rather than fixed.
Photo by eleven x.
Yes, I know this photo is of the old model. But it perfectly captures what’s still wrong with the new one.
The iPad has been my primary mobile computing platform since a couple years after it came out. I’ve had every version since the very first, and I immediately replaced that one when a version with LTE arrived. I spent two months traveling with my family last summer and only used my iPad. I’ve taken countless trips with nothing but it and my phone to get work done.
I’m not mobile-only. I have a 5k iMac on my desk, and am far more capable and productive on it than I would be on anything else, because of screen size if nothing else. It’s worth noting that I’ve worked professionally on MacOS (Classic and X), Solaris, Linux (I tried nearly every distro available until around 2008, and even tried the BSDs), BeOS, and once in a while a little Windows. I had two 21" Trinitron monitors on my desk in 1999, and I’ve spent more hours than I could count fiddling with my computing experience to maximize productivity. Heck, that’s what ended up with my starting Puppet: I just wanted to get more done, faster. So when I say the iPad is the most productive device for me in many situations, I’m saying that within the context of twenty years pursuing exactly this.
I’m a heavy iPad user, and it’s really important to me. I use my phone, but I love my iPad.
That context is important for this review to make sense. We’ve seen many reviews of the new iPad that could be summarized as, “I’ve been using a Windows desktop for twenty years, and the iPad still can’t replace it for my use cases.” Those reviews are useless. I mean, unless you’re one of those people. Get a Kindle, I guess. This review is for people who are willing to shift work styles and recognize that different platforms optimize for different problems. Success for the iPad is more about whether it has valid and compelling uses rather than whether it works for each and every one.
The short version of this review is that I love the new iPad Pro, but I decided not to keep it. I already have two of the older versions at home. The difference between this and previous generations is not a big enough jump for me in the ways I use it, especially given I’m between jobs. For the things that were working great, they now work better, but more of the things that weren’t working, it doesn’t really make an impact.
Your scroll bar is telling you, though, that this is a much longer review. Settle in. (Or silently close the tab, and save half an hour of your life.)
How I fell in love with the iPad
I know some find that travel is explicitly where they struggle to survive without a laptop, but it’s where I flipped the fastest. The easiest explanation for why - also explaining the importance of LTE - is my pattern of travel when I was still running Puppet.
Here’s what it looks like if I have a laptop:
I show up at the airport. I find a seat, pull my laptop up, log in, and join the local wifi. Most of the time this doesn’t work, because airports, so I tether with my phone. Then I wait. No idea how long. I use Apple’s Mail, and the desktop version has consistently had some issues downloading mail efficiently, especially from Google. I’ve tried literally every other mail app; don’t @ me. So I wait. When boarding is called, or all the mail is obviously downloaded, I close my laptop. I have often found myself carrying an open laptop through the boarding line because it’s not done yet.
On the plane, once we’re at 10k feet, I process the mail. When I was running Puppet, I received about 230 mails a day, and sent about 30. Ideally a 1.5 hour flight between PDX and SFO (my most common trip) would at least get me to “no scroll bar in my inbox”, and sometimes even inbox zero(tm).
I land. If I am taking a taxi, I get in, open my laptop, tether to my phone, and let the mail start flowing out. Some of them make it. Some don’t. I’ll try to join every wifi network I spend more than five minutes around. If I’m not taking a taxi, no mail gets sent until I get to my hotel after dinner, most likely - I can’t do this while driving, and the trains are usually too far underground to get service.
I just spend the rest of the day dealing with inconsistencies in the inbox on my phone and the one on my laptop. 🤷♀️
Here’s what it looks like on my iPad:
Once I get on the plane, I open the mail app on my iPad to make sure it’s fully synchronized. I then put it in airplane mode, and start reading on it. At 10k feet, I lower the tray and start typing. I’m a little less efficient on an iPad than a laptop, so I get a little less email done, but it’s shockingly similar.
When we land, I turn airplane mode off. I open the mail app just to ensure it’s going to synchronize as quickly as possible.
I get annoyed texts from my team about the torrent of emails I’ve just unleashed.
That’s it.
You could argue that this says nothing about the iPad. Any device that was always on and had an LTE connection could do this, no problem. But of course, my other computers don’t and can’t have these features. I honestly don’t know why I can’t get an Apple laptop with an LTE chip in it, but I do know why it’s not running 100% of the time.
Once my primary travel computing use case - email - flipped, I found a way to make most other things do so.
There are many people whose primary use for computers is sitting in one place, working on one or two problems for hours at a time. I’d be surprised to find those people prefer an iPad. Even if I could program on one, I wouldn’t want to, because the screen just isn’t big enough to show everything, and I can’t have all the windows open that I need.
But as a CEO, my job was constant change, constant context shifts, constant movement. I craved depth, but usually in vain. The iPad fits that life perfectly.
That’s why I love it.
The iPad today
Everyone has said this 1000x times: The iPad’s hardware is great, it’s the operating system that’s lacking. I agree, but I have more to say than that. And it’s not just about features like reading files off a disk, which I doubt I would ever use.
Apple has to (ahem) think differently about the device altogether. They’ve gotten better: They’ve agreed it’s not just a big phone, it has different users, different use cases. It needs a different experience.
But they’ve barely begun to work through the consequences.
I love my iPad. I use it more than every other device put together. I have for years. It is great at so much.
But its user experience for absolutely mundane work is a shocking embarrassment.
I built an automation company to almost 500 people. Our software was built on the recognition that system administrators - the people who make your computers work for you - were spending too much time on menial tedious work, and it got in the way of their real work. Puppet helped restructure their entire work life, automating away the tedium and making space for the most important, most valuable work.
The iPad has provided me great new abilities, but forces me to take the long way to using all of them. If you were to watch me using it, you’d notice that a huge portion of my direct interactions with it are only necessary because of its failures, not my desires. Some of this is not a ton better on the Mac, which always focused more on simplistic usability than working hard for power users. Coming from a fully customized keyboard-driven experience in FVWM and its descendants, I was never going to be happy. I still miss focus follows mouse with no window auto raise. But man, it could be a lot better.
I need you to understand. I want you to feel what I feel.
On my desk, my mouse is less than an inch from my keyboard.
But every single time I have to take my hand off the keyboard - every time - a large buzzer sounds in my room, a million candle power red light starts flashing, and the overhead sprinklers turn on.
Ok, it’s not quite that extreme. To the observer. But that’s what it feels like to me. When I say I want to do everything on the keyboard, what I mean is every time I have to do non-keyboard interactions it is a massive disruption in how I work, move, flow. It breaks my interaction. Some of these are ok - scrolling is probably the least disruptive, although it’s such a core use case it’s amazing there’s no good option from the keyboard1. But clicking into a text box? Selecting text? *shudder*
I grew up remodeling houses with my dad. Imagine a hammer that required I put it down every time I needed a new nail. Or a screw gun that required two hands to load a screw, so I had to hold it between my knees on a ladder. Insane. You could never get flow. You’d throw that stupid thing away.
That’s what it’s like to use an iPad.
Let’s just pick the simple stuff. Something I do every day, often multiple times a day. Let’s walk through each little step, get granular so you really see it.
I have to make a calendar event based on an email. I’m in Apple’s Mail, and the calendar app is next to it. Again, there’s an air horn next to me, a strobe light mounted to my left, and a bucket of water above my head, ready to tip over every time I touch the screen.
I’ll be generous. We’re making the appointment for today, so no need to navigate within the calendar to pick the right day.
Task one: Switch to the calendar app.
Oops. I foolishly have both apps on screen at once. You can’t shift focus between those apps. Or can you? Wait, what does focus even mean on an iPad? No one knows. I’m in Mail, so I know it starts with focus. I lift my right finger up, and select the slot on the calendar I want. The world explodes.
In this case changing focus would not have helped, because Google’s execrable iPad apps don’t really support keyboard shortcuts. Huh. The company whose keyboard shortcuts are so dominant in desktop email that everyone else is copying them, doesn’t even use them on mobile? Maybe if Apple cared, Google would? Probably not, but since Apple clearly doesn’t, why should they?
I wipe the water from my face, and am now in the new event pseudo-pop-up. Oops, I need to copy the email address of the person, because it’s someone not in my contacts. I slowly, cringing, move my finger back to the mail app. How many taps does it take to get to an email address? I’m not sure, but I think it’s about four. It should be Cmd-Tab, Cmd-R (to reply, which I have to do anyway), Shift-Tab a couple of times to get to the To field, Cmd-A, Cmd-C to copy the address (I can use arrows and such to get just one if I want), Cmd-Tab to get back to Calendar, Cmd-V to paste.
Yeah, not here. I think focus is now in the calendar app, so I have to touch the mail app again anyway. I hit the reply icon. I use Shift-Tab to get to the To field, which mostly works. I then try to copy the address. This fails at least 50% of the time. Like, just fails. I mean, the buttons on the keyboard work. But when I try to paste elsewhere, the clipboard appears to be empty. Or something. Nothing happens. Since I’d rather have a crappy workflow than an inconsistent one, I use my finger again to touch the email address. How does one copy an email address when copying doesn’t work?
You don’t! You drag! Because absolutely, the one fix I want to bad keyboard shortcuts is different touch experiences. I love that drag and drop is more powerful now, but can’t you get the basics working, too?
Honestly dragging is also inconsistent, but weirdly, I’ve found it’s more consistent than the keyboard. I frequently swap email addresses in a mail - when I respond to an intro, I swap the default ‘To’ person to BCC, and move the ‘CC’ to ‘To’. If I drag them around, it almost always works, but if I use the keyboard, it just… doesn’t. It fails differently all the time but nearly always fails.
Ok, so I drag it into Google Calendar. Hmm. I can’t seem to drop it on the Guest field. Maybe because it’s not the active text field? Ok, I let go, touch the calendar, and then tab to the guest field.
Hah! Just kidding. Tab doesn’t work, it just puts tabs in the event title. I touch the guest field, and drag again. This seems to actually work.
By now, I have successfully put a person’s email address in a field, and I’ve had 14 buckets of water dumped on my head, I’m flash blind, and I’ll never hear again.
I won’t bore you with the details of actually getting the rest done. Obviously GCal not having keyboard shortcuts of any use hurts a lot, but even better shortcuts would not help much, because the biggest disruption is switching apps back and forth, and once in an app, picking the correct field.
And before you tell me to switch to Fantastical or something, please. My calendar is currently showing eight separate calendar feeds, all different colors so I can easily tell them apart. E.g., mine, my wife’s, my travel, my kids, the two soccer clubs I follow (#gunners #RCTID). My main event feed further colors every event by event type. Just today I can see four different colors of event. And I only have one meeting I’m personally attending. Apparently no one else does this, because no other apps even come close to Google in effectively managing this overlay of info. Don’t @ me. I don’t know how you people live.
And also don’t try to tell me I should automate this whole process. Sure, you’re right. Except again, it would only work sometimes, I’m always dealing with natural language text that doesn’t easily parse, the automation would be brittle and I’d move from being pissed off at Apple and Google to being pissed off at my own code, and I’d spend my time trying to figure out how to build abstractions over similar automations on different platforms, version control them all, package and deploy them, and suddenly I’m trying to use Zapier with microservices in a docker container in a VM on my iPad just so I can create an event. That’s definitely better.
It should be clear to you by now that every time I do this from my living room, my basement floods, my neighbors call the cops because of the sirens, and the lights have knocked countless birds from the sky. It’s a disaster.
And this workflow is one of my most important, most common.
The basics just don’t work. Maybe you didn’t know you can “minimize” an email by dragging it by its top bar to the bottom of the screen. Where’s the shortcut for that? What about the one to cancel an email? Honestly just deleting email with the keyboard fails most of the time, and 100% of the time after the first few. Delete, delete, ooops now it doesn’t work. Of course, this is true on the desktop, too, so…
Everyone else, all the other app developers, they follow Apple’s lead. They know Apple does not respect the keyboard. So they don’t either.
But the thing is, this diatribe has nothing to do with the keyboard.
It has to do with my flow. And the flow of everyone who uses this device.
I love my iPad. But Apple has clearly not taken a critical eye to where it supports flow, and where it breaks it.
I grew up on a hippie commune in rural Tennessee. When I was about 7, the state built a bridge across a ravine, which shortened the drive to Nashville by 30 minutes. One bridge, and suddenly a trip we took all the time is an hour shorter, round-trip.
One little simplification can have a massive impact.
Apple is adding features, but not connecting them. They’ve run a freeway into town, but haven’t built all the feeder roads so people can use it. There’s a fancy bridge between two cities, but the roads to and from it are still gravel. There’s a high speed train between cities, but the stations are outside of town and you have to walk there.
It’s not enough to put things in place, they have to fit into a coherent, cohesive system.
And until Apple respects the iPad enough to really think about how it all fits together, I will finish my work day soaking wet. Brrr.
Now, about that new iPad
Naturally, I bought one of the new Pro models when it came out. I have the original (2016?) 12.9" at home, and also the 10.5" that came out in the spring of 2017, both with LTE and the keyboards, and one pencil to share.
I almost never use the big one. It’s just too big. It doesn’t fit into my EDC bag (mostly because that was specifically chosen to fit the smaller ones), it’s too unwieldy to read in bed on, and it’s just hard to move around like I do with my main one. I mostly use it to watch soccer games on while I’m making breakfast on weekends. I’d sell it, but we often have five kids at our house playing Minecraft or Roblox, and I would never hear the end of it if we were short one.
I think Apple did exactly the right thing by making the big one smaller and growing the screen size of the small one. I don’t think it will, but I really want the new big one to work for me. The thing I miss most about my desktop is the big screen. I want more space, bigger screens, multiple of them. I had two screens on every one of my computers starting in 1998, until I got this 27" iMac - the screen is finally big enough, and managing windows on multiple monitors on a Mac was just not worth it.
So, I got the big one to try it out. I bought it just before heading out to visit my family for the holidays. I left my smaller iPad pro at home, to force me to use this for everything, including reading books in bed.
I returned it on the 14th day.
I loved it. If I were still gainfully employed, I would have kept it. I’m having to optimize a lot for lack of income right now, and that goes big time into my decision. Even without that constraint, a lot is riding on iOS 13 to deliver real improvements. I’m expecting to be disappointed.
The reality is, the device is too similar to the two I already have. When I was less money constrained, it made sense to take every incremental upgrade. Today it does not.
For all my lack of keeping it, though, I think it’s worth sharing my experience. I think it’s enough different from others that it stretches the tapestry a bit.
The bigger one is enough smaller that it really does feel different. I could see myself traveling with just that, no smaller one - I just did for ten days. But I would have to replace the bag I have carried for years. A bigger bag would mean I’d pack more, and be less happy. But honestly, I think it would be worth it. I could consolidate to just one iPad, mostly portable but big enough to be more productive. I would love that.
One area performance was immediately obvious was loading photos. One of the things I love most about the iPad Pro compared to other iPads is just how fast it downloads from SD cards. last summer I took more than 6000 (yes, you read that right) photos, mostly on my Fuji XT-2, and processed them all on my iPad. The connection on the Pro is waaaaay faster than on the normal devices, and it makes a huge difference. The new one seems to download the photos even faster, so fast the thumbnails are shown even more slowly than the data makes it onto the device.
That being said, most of the speed doesn’t matter that much to me right now. I’m typing this on a 12.9" that’s almost three years old, and I suffer through the app reloads and web page refreshes that the new one did not force on me. But it’s a pretty minor sacrifice for what I do, which is mostly reading and writing.
One of the biggest features in this new one was a mixed bag. I love having Face ID. Sometimes. Apple stubbornly insists this is a portrait device. That’s wrong for the smaller device usually, but always for the big one. Like, literally, I never use it in portrait mode. I know some do, in a stand or something. I don’t. That poor decision by Apple compromises Face ID so badly that I think they’ll move the camera in the next release. Here’s why:
I’m right handed, so I use my right index finger for most touch interactions. This leaves my left hand to hold the device, move it around, etc. And when I do that, where am I holding it? Right over the camera.
Pair that with the fact that Face ID is built to be used less than two feet from your face, and it’s a bad setup. I am sitting on my recliner in my living room, and every time I use the device here, it would say, “Face too far away”. I grab it with my left hand to move it closer, and now I’ve got the camera covered.
When I got the iPhone X, it was a magical experience. I just did not notice Face ID. On the iPad Pro, I’m getting a constant “You’re holding it wrong” experience instead. I’m having to babysit how I log in or authenticate, and have constant friction. Again, all because Apple is wrong about how their customers use this device.
The other big feature is the new pencil. I would use this one more than the old one, but not a lot. I basically only ever use them when taking notes in meetings. That was much more important years ago, less so now, but it’s still not that useful for how I work. Most of my text apps don’t support it (e.g., the app I’m writing this in, Ulysses), so any notes get sequestered in Apple Notes, which is a consumer app that fails quickly for me when asked to do complex information management. I need complex folders, with PDFs sitting next to notes and text files. I mean, duh, I want to organize by content subject, not content type. Plus my handwriting is illegible. So I agree the pencil setup is better, but that’s more a statement of how bad it was than how clever or great it is now. I know this matters a lot to some, just not that much to me.
The larger screen really is better. I don’t do “multitasking”, but I often have two apps on screen. E.g., when I process email, I almost always need to look at my calendar. With the bigger screen I can have my calendar in a small window, showing daily view, and it works great. I can only do this on my small device if I squint a lot. Being in my 40s is awesome. (It’s not all work; I also often have Destiny Item Manager and Discord open at the same time.) Again, note, this is about allowing me to get all the apps for one task on a screen. The computer is multitasking, I am not.
The new keyboard folio is pretentiously named, and such a bad wrapper for such a beautiful device that I’m embarrassed to touch or see it. I think technically the first case for the first iPad might have been worse, but wow that’s a low bar. So I have three color choices for my $1500 device, but I have to wrap them all in a slate-colored piece of vinyl? Shameful.
I guess the new setup is better. I definitely love having two angles, and it’s certainly less confusing for others to use the device. It’s a bit more disorienting for this expert user, though. I never got lost on my old iPad, but this one is sufficiently featureless that I’m always struggling to hold it in just the right way when opening it. Where’s the hinge? What corner does the camera go in? I frequently felt like I was studying a foreign object rather than using a well-known device. It needs to be far more obvious how to grab it, how to open it. The asymmetry of the old one was ugly, but you would never be confused about where the hinge is, or the bottom, or anything else. And the keyboard being exposed on the back is just a mess. It gets filthy, that filth passes to the screen, etc. Yuck.
That being said, the actual keyboard bit is better. I am typing this on the old one, on my lap, so clearly that was never a problem for me, as it apparently was for others. But the new one is more rigid, and the actual typing seems better. I mean, not good compared to my mechanical keyboards, but better.
So for this one, I’m calling a pencil: Wow the last one was really really bad. This one’s a bit better, so it’s only really bad. Unlike the pencil it’s a real downgrade in orienting yourself on the device when you first pick it up. The materials and handling issues guarantee no better than a middling grade.
I like smaller bezels and the new form factor, but honestly none of that matters to me except for how it makes the device smaller. Yes, Apple has a knack for industrial design that immediately makes everything that came before seem antiquated, but I’ll suffer through somehow. My car is six years old. I’ll be ok. I’ll just start calling my old devices dadcore.
Conclusion
It often seems that Apple’s industrial designers are their favorite kid, and the software designers are only there because someone has to fill the machines with stuff. Jony Ive gets to lovingly expound from his featureless white room on the physical bits, but, ah, not so much on what it’s like to use it for anything other than a dinner plate. That’s someone else’s job, someone else’s love.
I don’t think this is “new Apple”. Holy cow I hated early releases of OS X. Yes, it’s far more important than my interfaces be lickable than usable. Of course.
Apple’s operating systems usually do have a much user experience than others. But, ah, you’re comparing yourself to XWindows, which still can’t automatically detect an external monitor2, and Windows, which is a clean-room copy of MacOS done by aliens. The competition isn’t exactly fierce.
After college, I switched from MacOS to BeOS. I loved that OS. There was so much forward thinking in it, and there was a real conversation about what usability really meant, with a close connection between the people building it, developing for it, and using it. When it went away, I had no real choice but to switch to Linux. Literally every year I cycled through all of the distros in hopes of finding one that didn’t require me to hand-maintain my X.org config to support two monitors, but always ended up back on Debian, because at least its packaging was sane.
I finally switched to Mac when I realized: Once a year, I spend a week being livid, utterly pissed, bright red and burning hot, at Apple, all their products, and how they seem to just not like or trust their customers.3 But I spent an hour every day feeling like that about Linux. I eventually concluded I’d rather compartmentalize all of that into one chunk than spread it evenly throughout my life.
So yeah, I love my Apple devices, but, like, only compared to everything else. I hate software, but I’m pragmatic.
With that as a preface, here is the most accurate, but also most damning, review I can give for these new iPads:
They are a stunning implementation of the wrong thing.
The easiest way to see this is looking at the Apple logo on the back of the iPad. If you use the new keyboard, it’s covered in shame, but on my existing devices, it’s either hidden or sideways. If I am not using the keyboard, it’s wrapped around hiding the logo, but if I am using it, then I’m in landscape, and the logo is on its side.
The crazy thing is that Apple already learned this lesson! They used to ship their laptops with the Apple logo upside down. Or rather, it was right side up when just sitting there, but not when you actually used it.
Look, I don’t care about the logo. It wasn’t my blind spot that led to this.
What I care about is what it means that Jony Ive, Tim Cook, and all of the other leadership aren’t seeing these sideways logos every day, and tearing their hair out.
I’m trying to imagine an exec meeting there, with fifteen Apple logos sideways around the room, and everyone just shrugging. I can’t. Someone has to notice, be pissed off, right?
I can only conclude they don’t use these devices the way I do, and that causes me some despair. They still have a long road to walk. They’ll get there. But not soon.
The first thing I do every morning is turn off rotation lock, and enabling it is the last thing I do every night. I only need it enable when reading it bed, and the rest of the time I want to easily switch back and forth. This little bit of software friction cuts my usage of the keyboard by like 50%. One of the best things about using the big iPad is it’s too big to read in portrait, so this problem goes away.
A teeny software change could just ignore rotation lock when the keyboard is attached.
That software change would have happened ages ago if the people building these products used them anything like how I do.
Since they obviously don’t, I am not optimistic they’re going to make the right fixes.
Yes, there are a bunch of features they should add. But it’s more important they make a psychological shift in what this thing is for.
This device does give me some bit of hope. Even they can’t ignore the debacle that is Face ID with these things in landscape. That will push them to reorient.
Until then, you’ll just have to hide your sideways logo. But I’ll know it’s there.