Category: Technology

Some Additional Thoughts on Using the OG iPad Pro… still.

I was a guest on Tim Chatan’s iPad Pros Podcast last year, talking about still using the 2015 iPad Pro in 2021. Well, it’s 2022 and I am still using the thing.

I’ve mentioned enjoying Patrick Rhone’s enough, and have said for a while the OG iPad Pro is still enough. It’s still enough for me, barely, and on a frugal technicality.

The battery is completely and totally trashed. I might get like 3 hours battery life, and it drains quite a but sleeping. A few years ago, before the pandemic, my battery was just hovering above the 80% health cutoff for Apple to do a $99 repair. Now, it has probably passed that, but I don’t want to spend the money to replace the battery in a 7-year-old device.

Apparently, I don’t want to spend any money to fix the problem. Which has me to contemplating the iPad’s role in my in life these days.

The iPad is mainly the bed time computer for me. It’s what I read Twitter on, RSS, surf web, etc. It’s a complete consumption device for me. Almost any sort of creative work I have moved to my MacBook Air. .

If my iPad died, I’d probably replace it, but I’m not sure with what, and it’s why I keep the kicking the can down the road. With the new iPads, I’d also want a new Apple Pencil so that adds $130 to every price. Matt Birchler’s USB-C is one of the best quality-of-life changes in tech in the past decade prompted me to think about this in greater detail.

I am trying to move everything that has a cable or charger to USB-C. I got the new Kindle Paperwhite mainly for the USB-C cable. I have a charging hub next to the bed, and now it just has Lightning and USB-C.

I likely should just get the iPad Air with USB-C, but until Apple removes the Lightning connector, I am always going to have that cable at hand. Frankly, the base $329 iPad is what I would probably get. I can still use my 1st Generation Pencil.

What I have given a lot of thought to, though, the iPad Mini. The price — including the $130 for the new Pencil — is less than the cost of just the Air. It has the new design, and the USB-C chip. Lee Patterson had some good observations about the Mini. Hopefully, I can continue kicking this can down the road long enough for the M1 chip to migrate to the Mini.

I need to actually spend some time with one in an Apple Store, though. I am concerned going from the 12.9” screen to the 8.7” might be a little too harsh. I’d certainly welcome the lighter weight, though.

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A Few Random Thoughts on Intentional Computing

I am not a huge fan of the notion of digital minimalism, or minimalism in general. The slippery slope for either of those ends in a sort of ascetic lifestyle. Especially in digital minimalism, there seems to be a prevailing theory of there must be only work.

That said, I have worked on adopting Intentional Computing. The basis for this is you sit down at the computer and focus on the activity you want. This can be productive or just playing a game.

Shortcuts

Like everyone who tries to be intentional about their computers, I fail a lot. I will look up a reference video and end up watching a video about muskrats or something. To help with this, I have a brute force Shortcut — Apps — I use to help me focus. This shortcut allows me to choose from a list:

  • Quit All Apps: This is a complete system reset and, well, quits every open app. I use this a lot to clear out clutter of open apps and resets my view to allow me to begin an activity I want to focus on. I also use this as part of my nightly shut down routine so I have a clear pallate in the morning.
  • Work Start: This launches the apps I need for the day job: Things, our VDI application, Teams, Webex, and OneNote. It also quits all running applications at the start.
  • Work Quit: This shuts down the work-specific apps. Things will stay open for personal stuff, but the jobby job stuff gets quit.
  • Work Refocus: This to help me recenter if I feel I am drifting to far away from work. Like, if I take a break and Discord and Tweetbot are still running. This one quits all non-work apps except Overcast stays running since I will listen to a podcast while working.

A few Thoughts on Gaming

I likely spend too much non-work time playing games. Some of this related to what Greg Morris wrote about “Making Friends as an Adult Sucks”. My main time wasters are online games like Final Fantasy XIV. A large amount of my friends aren’t physical friends but people I know in these games. Especially during the pandemic when we were really in a lockdown, these relationships were a lifeline. Virtual Worlds let me leave the house when I am unable, or unwilling.

I do often think of just uninstalling all the games, especially online games1, and really having that ascetic, there is nothing but productivity lifestyle. This is fool’s errand. The reasons I’m not creating, and this is the first blog post in over a year, have nothing to do with gaming and more about my own headspace at the time. You could lock me in a cabin in the woods and if I don’t want to create, I won’t.

The thing that does work, and I need to go back to, is the notion of using my leisure activities as more of a reward for good behavior. Did I create something that day? By all means, play a game. Did I bust my ass during the day job and have earned a mental break? Play the game. Creating does a lot of heavy work in that requirement. Working on a model for my model trains for a little bit counts.

  1. I am not even going to mention how often I have uninstalled and reinstalled World of Warcraft this week. ↩

The M1 Air

The M1 Air

Ended, my ‘Using the iPad as a Main Computer’ phase has. 

Using my iPad as a main computer was always a lofty, if unrealistic goal. The closest I came was the betas for iOS 13. I could set an iCloud folder to always reside on the device1. However, over time I started doing more data analysis work with Tableau and drawing in AutoCAD. Neither of them work at all on the iPad. If can’t do something on the iPad, it’s not a wall I graze against, it’s one I slam into.

The iPad, though, became my main secondary device. If I went out for some light writing (remember coffee shops?) and didn’t want to drag my 15” MacBook Pro with me I’d bring the iPad in its keyboard case.

I bought the 15” because I wanted the dGPU as well as trying the minimalist just a laptop and an empty desk routine. I got neck pains from just using the MacBook, so I ended up with monitors on the desk again. The dGPU helped a little, but 4 years later it is barely more effective than an integrated chip. Large laptops aren’t very portable, obviously, and I’d run into issues using it on the train (remember trips to Boston?).

My favorite laptop, though, was my old 11” Air. Even recently, I used it frequently during times I needed macOS but didn’t want to move the 15”. There exists a parallel universe where instead of getting the 11”, I got the Retina 13” Pro, thus negating getting the 15” with the Retina screen.

When the M1 Macs were announced, my plan was to wait until the first of the 4-port Macs were announced and get the 13” (or 14”) version. My feeling was the M1 Macs now were the slowest we’d see, and the true Pro machines would be fucking amazing.

But, I kept going back to the idea of the 11” Air and how I dragged that thing around with me constantly. Super light; super portable. The 15” became more of a conscious choice: do I need the big laptop?

All that said, while I hated the keyboard on the 2016, I still overall liked it. I wasn’t a fan of the TouchBar, but I could deal with it. It was decently fast and I could play my games for the most part fine. Back in November, it popped the alert that the battery requiring servicing. The 15s aren’t known for their amazing battery life anyway, and and with a crippled battery it was horrible battery life.

When I looked at replacing the battery, I thought I’d rather put the money to a new laptop. This was a good time to downsize to a portable machine. Even though mobile for me now means changing rooms.

Which lead me to taking a longer look at the M1 Macs out now. We had passed the period where the early reviews are the usual amazing, and also now could get some real-world usage over a few months2. If there was one tipping point, it was Marco Arment mentioning on ATP that he was very happy not using his iMac Pro and using the Air as his main computer. Marco, to put it politely, is fussy about his computer setups. If the Air, the lowly Air, was enough power for someone who sweats the small stuff on this, it was likely good enough for me. Looking at Geekbench scores, I was going to gain 1k on single-threaded, and 5k on multithreaded. The M1s are basically very close to iMac Pro performance. In a MacBook Air. An iMac Pro is already more power than I need, so waiting for an even faster version of a computer seemed superfluous.

Which lead to a lot of internal debate over a Pro or Air. The Pro has active cooling and better battery life. The Air, though, is a style I love with the wedge shape. I could also get it in gold. As with waiting for a faster Pro, a few more hours of battery life — on a device that also about quadruples my battery life from the 15” — again was superfluous.

Another data point was ArenaNet completely dropping Mac support, and Bethesda saying they would not support M1s. Neither of these are games I play, but did prove a suspicion I had: Apple Silicon will likely force a lot of the game developers for games I do like to either have to go all-in on Mac support, or cut their losses. It is likely around the time Apple ends Rosetta 2 support I will need a gaming PC to keep playing some of my games.

So, you may be asking, that the heck does this have to do with iPads? A valid question.

As mentioned in my piece, Life with a Series 0 Watch, Older Tech, and COVID-19, I have a Quixotic quest to try and get down to just one damn device and an iPhone. For years, I wanted this device to be an iPad. I will admit, the ascetic lifestyle of a digital hermitage on just an iPad appeals to me. Folks like Chris Lawley, who performs almost all his life on an iPad, are fascinating.

The M1 Air, though, pretty much does give me that one device. The main uses for my iPad are News, Instapaper, and Overcast. News and Instapaper have Mac-native apps, and I can use the iPad version of Overcast on my M1. The M1 wakes from sleep and is usable as quickly as my iPad.

I’ve had the M1 for about a month, and I feel like I have a fast, retina version of my beloved 11” Air.

  1. This feature never made it out of beta. ↩︎
  2. If there is one thing reviewing MMOs back in the day taught me: There is a significant difference between my feelings at publication date, and my feeling 2-3 months later. ↩︎

Life with a Series 0 Watch, Older Tech, and COVID-19

I have mentioned this before, but I am a huge fan of Patrick Rhone’s enough, and Minimal Mac. Patrick is probably the closest I have to a minimalist sensei.

Patrick still uses his older 11” MacBook Air as his daily driver. Back in 2014 he wrote an excellent post: Not for Me. The thesis was that he decided the products Apple released are not worth reaching for his wallet, and his existing tech still worked for him.

I still use my Apple Watch Series 0. It’s five years old, and every year I think the newer Apple Watches will finally get me to reach for my wallet. This year, like other years, I decided my Series 0 is still, well, enough for me. It’s not that I think the new Watches suck. It’s that they don’t solve $400 worth of problems for me. The only thing that makes me think of getting a new watch is the EKG sensors.

Likewise, my iPad is a 2015 12.9” iPad Pro. The battery on it is kind of shot and doesn’t yet register under 80% health for a cheap battery replacement. This is probably the longest I have kept an iPad. My iPhone 8+ still trucks along just fine and I don’t see a burning need to replace it as well.

In 2016, I bought a new 15” MacBook Pro. This device is the likely upgrade candidate with the new M1 Macs. There are times I feel like I am pushing the power constraints on it, and, yeah, that damn keyboard. When balancing out power vs portability, my old 2014 11” MacBook Air still wins some usability battles1. This makes me think that maybe I will get a 4-port, 13” Pro when they come out.

I have a strong aversion to getting rid of tech that still satisfies a use case. The likely catalyst to buying a new iPad will be when a new version of iOS stops supporting my iPad. My relationship with my tech is dichotomous: I want to use the best tool for the job; but I also Quixotically continue to bang away at a One Device to Rule Them All2 mentality. Even with my 11” Air and my daily driver 15” Pro, maintaining both computers has a mental overhead. If I don’t use my Air for a bit, the first use is a miasma of app updates and iCloud syncing. As Matt Gemmell said, devices have “a weight that’s not from its mass.” The ascetic lifestyle of iPad-only lifestyle appeals to me, but these days so much of my social interactions are online games and weekly Skype gaming sessions with my friends, the monastic lifestyle of only having an iPad would be unpleasant. When I periodically purge my space of cruft that builds up, the stereotypical empty room with just a desk and a laptop appeals to me. This tends to be an overreaction for when I realize I have 3 computers going, with two games running as a switch between them like a dog chasing a flock of squirrels.

We don’t live in a non-COVID world, as much as some people would like to pretend we don’t. I don’t really leave the house these days. Gone are the days of working for a few hours in a coffee shop. I made an appearance in the office thrice since March. Mobile these days means I might go down to the family room, or the patio, and do some work. Since the big issue with my iPad is battery life, and I am rarely away from a power outlet, resolving that issue isn’t a high priority.

This current-state isn’t going away any time soon. When I look ahead to 2021, every instance I think of where I’d need a more mobile solution isn’t going to happen. My big gaming convention I spend 4 days in a hotel geeking out? They already announced it will be virtual next year. I love going into Boston for the day, wandering around and getting some good food. The idea of getting onto public transportation and doing all that seems so foreign to me.

  1. There exists a scenario where I upgrade the 256gb SSD in the 11” to a larger drive. ↩
  2. The scales continue to shift to the Mac. Instapaper now has a version that runs on even Intel-based Macs. ↩

iPad Life: Additonal Thoughts on the iPad Pro

I am going to largely ignore the hubbub and criticism that surrounded the iPad 10th Anniversary. For the most part my comments in the Almost Four Years retrospective still stand: I remain divided about the iPad and its place in my life. It is both one of my favorite Apple devices, and one of the most frustrating.

I will say I find iPadOS to be a frustrating release. I frequently have to jiggle my smart-connected keyboard to get it to work, often needing to force quit Messages for the keyboard to work again.

The battery life on my first gen 12.9 is horrible. Two visits to the Apple Store in the last 6 months yield a battery that is close to eligibility for the battery replacement. In September I was between 85-87% battery health; on February 10th it was at 82%. The battery drain is worse than 17% loss, and feels more like 50%. In a meeting it dropped from 72 to 52% in about 20 minutes. The trip to Apple prompted a review of background apps. Nothing really stood out, but there were a few interesting data points. Things 3 had 4.5 hours of background refresh over the last 10 days, and Home and Lock Screen was also at 4 hours background over the same period. When I got home I took the drastic step of wiping my iPad, setting it up as new, and turning off almost all background app refresh. The results are slightly better, but it’s too early to say. The battery life in iOS 13 continues to be a hot topic on the MacRumors forums.

However, over the last week or so I’ve started brining my iPad instead of my MacBook Pro when I leave the house. The draw of the iPad is a light I can’t veer away from. In the parlance of Patrick Rhone, it is often enough. While I enjoy using apps like Tableau, which isn’t available on the iPad, a decent amount of my Tableau time is just refreshing data and viewing the results. Publishing the workbooks on Tableau Public with an auto-refresh of Google Sheets data fills that need.

My yearly theme for 2020 is Creativity. I constantly ding myself for not drawing, and this year drawing is one of my creative goals. The iPad is the perfect tool for that. Even AutoCAD, which kinda sucks on the iPad, is enough for me to do some hard-line drawings on the iPad.

The mantra I frequently use is the iPad is the ideal mobile creation tool, and I want to get back into having that focus in my life.

Year of Evaluation in Review

To be honest, I had forgotten my yearly theme was to evaluate my current tech footprint. I was reviewing an old article and found a reference to it:

My theme for 2019 Evaluation. For the record, I’m not looking at making major life changes. I am, however, evaluating the devices, apps, and services I use. For now, it’s a lot of data collection. What do I use my Mac and iPad for? I say I want to use x app more, but over the year I use y app instead. I promised myself it was unlikely I was going to upgrade any of my devices. Some of this is price. The increased price of the new iPad Pro may not have completely turned me away, but also needing to buy a new Smart Keyboard and Pencil (also at a roughly 20% price premium) surely did. The same with my iPhone. I used my 6 for three years, and I expect to get 4-5 out of my 8 Plus. New iPhones are more expensive and my existing one works just fine. For me to upgrade I need to see real-world improvement; not just benchmarked improvement.

The Hardware Situation

After a trip into Boston where I felt I needed a Sherpa, I made a conscious effort to return to a belief I had strayed away from: iPhone +11. That means on most trips out of the house, I will bring my iPhone and one other device. Too often this year I felt I was bringing a MacBook (Pro or Air), iPad, and iPhone. It was too much, and I wasn’t using the devices to justify the load. It is not a hard and fast rule, but for me to bring both I really need to feel that the two devices are needed.

Once I readopted this philosophy, I also found myself leaving the iPad at home. Some of this is the Logitech Slim Combo case bulks the iPad up to where my 11” MacBook Air is lighter, and iPadOS still presenting a few barriers. All that said, most of the time when I leave the house it is to go to work, where I can’t use personal devices as my primary work computer. I do use my own stuff for supplemental tasks like taking notes. All my work notes end up in OneNote, but I am thinking of going back to just using my iPad and Pencil to take handwritten notes.

At the end of the yearly theme, the winners are: MacBook Pro first; iPad second; and MacBook Air is the third choice. The few times I feel I need both, the Air and iPad will be the first choice.

Writing Apps

The main evaluation I wanted to complete in 2019 was a decision on writing apps. All my other apps are situational, and the task at hand will drive the proper app. Writing, however, is pretty much just pushing the cursor to the right.

The winner at the end of the year is Ulysses and IA Writer. Ulysses iI use for about 95% of my writing, and the odd use case it can’t handle, I will use IA Writer. A blog post I am working on uses tables. Ulysses doesn’t support them, so I will use IA writer for that.

The main requirement I walked away from at the year was my writing tools needed to be flexible between macOS and iOS. This is why Scrivener loses out. The iOS version is not as feature-complete as the macOS version and uses a modal Dropbox sync. Scrivener may be the final step for a long-form publication, but I will not be using it as the main writing apps.

Cloud Storage

This was a challenging evaluation. I waffled between all the major players: OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud. My goal was to get to one for the main file storage. I would count iCloud+1 if I only used iCloud for apps that wrote to their own folders, but the bulk of my files were in say, Dropbox. At the end of the year, I ended up just using iCloud. I decided that paying for Dropbox was basically leasing a hard drive, so I moved all of my files to iCloud and uninstalled all of the other cloud providers. I am hoping that later versions of iOS will enable the promised iCloud Drive improvements. This does make syncing files between my MacBooks something I need to make sure happens. I keep the Air closed and plugged in, so sync doesn’t happen in the background. Every now and then I make sure everything syncs up ok.

2020’s Yearly Theme

The Year of Evaluation was a bridge year to my planned 2020 theme: Creativity. My desire was by evaluating tools and processes in 2019, I’d just get it out of my system. So far, it is working well. Creativity is a vague theme that is basically fuck off less. Working on my trains, Tableau, photo editing, etc. all count as creativity. The year is just getting going, but I am feeling great about my progress so far.

  1. And, if I am honest, just the iPhone is enough most times. ↩

iPad Life: (Almost) Four Years of the iPad Pro

Next February will be four years since I bought the first-generation 12.9” iPad Pro. It’s the first iPad I purchased as mainly a creation, not consumption, device. I wrote about my thoughts on the Pro a year in, and this is a follow-up to that article.

A Privileged, Superfluous, Device

The reality of my iPad Pro usage is if the device died1, I wouldn’t replace it — at least not with another Pro. This is also why I have not invested in a new iPad. I still feel this iPad is enough for me. Four years in, my simple conclusion to the iPad Pro is: it proves valuable enough to my general workflows to justify using it, but not indispensable enough to replace or upgrade it. Not upgrading is an easy conclusion. I don’t feel my 12.9″ is slow, nor is the move to USB-C and the slimmer design a stress point. The device works fine, so it doesn’t need to be upgraded.

My reasons for not replacing will come out through this piece, but while the iPad is a joy to use, and I love creating on it, there really isn’t much I do on the iPad I can’t do on a Mac.

An Alternate Universe, In Which I Bought a MacBook, Instead of the 11” Air

In February 2015 I bought my 11” Air. In March, Apple announced the 12” MacBook for an April ship date. If the series of technical failures that resulted in the purchase of the Air occurred 2 months later, I would have bought the 12” instead of the 11”. Mainly, for the retina screen. The reason I got the 11” was for maximum portability, and the 12” would fit that use case.

If that happened, I am not sure I would have bought the iPad Pro, or my 15” Pro. The MacBook would be an ideal mobile creation tool. If I did get the iPad Pro, I doubt I would also have bought the Smart Keyboard, and instead just used the Pencil for note-taking and drawing, and bring the MacBook for writing.

The minimalist in me wants one device to rule them all. Having an iPad and MacBooks Air and Pro is, at times, excessive. I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to mentally resolve this with no real outcome, other than to maintain the status quo.

The Ideal Mobile Creation Device

My main creative output is: writing, editing photos, and light drawing/note taking. My ideal mobile writing tool prior to the iPad Pro (IPP) was my 11″ MacBook Air. That little laptop still kicks ass, and will the subject of a future article. While the IPP is larger (and thicker, when in its keyboard case) than the Air, the spirit of a mobile platform to write on is also present in the iPad. If I want leave the house and just write, most often the iPad will be that device.

All mobile solutions for an iPad need to remember the iPad is first and foremost a touch device that can be used in a multitude of angles and positions. Jamming the tablet into a contraption like the Brydge keyboard gets away from the pure form of the tablet. While a keyboard is essential for quick and accurate typing, I also feel it should take just a quick tug to convert it back to a tablet. I have the Logitech (not-so) Slim Keyboard, and while the back of the tablet is encased in silicon, the smart keyboard is quickly detachable. I prefer the old Smart Keyboard Cover, but Apple doesn’t make them for the original 12.9 any more, and I had reliability problems with them at any rate.

In the extreme digital minimalist situation, my Computer in the Woods would be a device running Procreate, Ulysses, and Affinity Photo. Those three apps are critical to my creative process; everything else is a distraction. I have thought about doing this, too. In fits of pique where I feel I am just not advancing my creative goals, I think of wiping my devices down to those applications. It’s an ascetic form of minimalism, to be sure.

The Pencil, and the Myth of Drawing

In the original review, I commented:

What pushed me over the line was a strong desire to get back into drawing, and rather than spend the cash on a really good drawing tablet, I could get the iPad Pro and a Pencil. There are plenty of apps that let you draw on the iPad. I wanted the freedom of movement the iPad offered.

I haven’t done enough drawing to justify the iPad. I do use the Pencil for taking notes in meetings, but my drawing is limited to just doodling. It is clear to me that over the last four years, my unwillingness to draw overtakes the desire to do anything about it. I have no solutions to this, other than an observation that clearly drawing isn’t the priority I hoped it would be.

iPad Only, and Why I Can’t

Ergonomics, and side issues like needing to work from home via our remote desktop system, I could suffice with the iPad as my only device. It would be a lean existence, with no games I like to play. There are rare times I need to print, and my printer isn’t AirPrint compatible. I do have a Alienware Alpha that is my file and media server. I could offload gaming and printing to that. Right now though, nothing technology-related needs to change, so I am not expending much effort on that.

Edge cases and side issues are only outliers until they become the task you need to do right then. At that point the inability do to those isn’t quaint; it’s a roadblock. The iPad is the least flexible of my devices. Let’s imagine a world in which the iPad is my only non-phone device. If I know in advance I am going to work from home, I can bring my work laptop home2. But, on unplanned days off, the inability to effectively use Horizon View on my iPad is a deal breaker. Sure, there is an app, but tasks like right-clicking are a pain in the ass. I would not want to work a full 8-plus hour day off the iPad app.

Also, no one I know that is “iPad-only” is 100% on the iPad. Federico Viticci still uses a Mac to record podcasts.3 Matt Gemmell uses Scrivener to create the final PDFs for his paperback books. Edge cases, again, until they are needed.

Doing a week to 30-day iPad-only challenge would likely be possible. At the least it would let me assess what is important and what is not.

The Challenges of iPad Productivity

In MacPower Users #512, David Sparks confessed he bought a 16” MacBook Pro. Now, granted, David has pretty much no self-control when it comes to tech, but his reasoning was solid: the iPad is a great laptop-alternative, until it’s not. He was going on a trip he needed to do some heavy Excel work, and the iOS version of Excel was not fit for this purpose.

The iPad has come a long way since its inception in 2010, but not far enough since the release of the Pro. Some of this is to be expected. The initial Pro was a solution in search of a problem. The OS and apps took a while to adjust to the idea of Pro use cases. Ulysses was always a capable iPad app, but apps like Ferrite really showed that you could use an iPad for previously Mac-only tasks, like podcast editing.

iOS now is more capable of heavy tasks. The Files app in iOS 13 is close to a Finder-level app on iOS. We can finally access the On my iPad storage as a local storage device. Previously, that area was hidden away for app usage only. We can connect external storage, and connect to servers. Where it falls apart still is accessing (and editing) Cloud-files when not connected to a network. On the Mac, your Dropbox and iCloud Drive files can be set to keep a local copy. You can’t do that on the iPad. A future release of iOS will let you pin a folder for offline use, but for now you need to make sure files you want to edit are stored offline before hitting the road.

Another challenge is app developers. The developers of Ulysses, Ferrite, and the Affinity apps treat the iPad a first-class citizen. The majority of other apps (Scrivener, Microsoft Office, AutoCad) treat the iPad as secondary device. The unspoken thought is: that iPad is fine for doing some light work and editing, but to do the heavy lifting you will still want to use a Mac.

The Trickle-down Effect of the Pro

One area I think the iPad Pro was successful at is beginning the sea change that iPads are capable creation devices. Now, previously Pro features like the Pencil and Smart Keyboard are available on almost every iPad (the ASK can’t work on the Mini). This means for less than the price of a Pro iPad, you can get a regular-sized iPad, a Pencil, and the Smart Keyboard. A year ago, my iPad Pro dying would likely end up with me abandoning the iPad. Getting a Pro, a new Pencil, and a new Keyboard case would run me more than just getting a MacBook Pro. I wouldn’t replace it as a productivity device. I would just go back to writing on my MacBook Air or Pro. I would feel comfortable spending $1700 on an iPad solution if it could truly become my only device. When it’s a secondary device, not so much. When I priced out a 10.5” Air, with a new Smart Keyboard, it was $800 since I can use my existing Pencil. That is easier to justify, since I do use the Pencil a fair amount.

 

  1. I dropped it on a hard floor right as I typed that. Sometimes you do tempt fate. ↩
  2. I am NOT dragging that thing home every night. ↩
  3. Federico does have an iPad recording setup, but I don’t know if he uses it all the time. ↩

Digital Minimalism: Sorting out Cloud Storage

One of the digital minimalism tenets I use is online (and removable) storage is akin to paying for a storage locker for your physical goods. It is easy to just shove files online or to a USB drive without questioning whether you really need all of those files. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course. It ignores prudent backup strategies. We live in a world where we have multiple devices and we want our stuff on all of those devices.

So while I still pay for cloud storage (iCloud and Dropbox), I do try and be mindful of the shit I throw up there.

iCloud, iOS 13, and Catalina

The simplest solution would be to just use iCloud. I pay for the 256gb option mainly for photo storage, backups, and PDFs in iBooks. There are two main reasons I can’t go all-in on iCloud: Scrivener, and lack of selective/smart sync. Now, selective sync is one of those gray areas for my digital minimalism tenet. After all, if the storage of the files exceeds the storage space on my devices, well, why do I keep it? Honestly, it’s a valid question I don’t have the answer to. It is something I think about often, but for now there are things I don’t need replicated all of my devices.

Scrivener only uses Dropbox for syncing projects between Mac and iOS. This sync method is something that I am factoring in to my pros and cons between Scrivener and Ulysses.

A lot of this changes with the next versions of iOS and macOS. While there isn’t true selective/smart sync, both OSs let me pin a folder to ensure its contents stay downloaded. My limited tests show that a pinned folder will automatically download a newly-added file without any prompting.

Dropbox

Dropbox has a few things going for it. Scrivener works with it. It has true selective/smart sync. It also retains versions and deletion history better than iCloud. Dropbox recently raised its prices from $9.99 to $11.99 a month. This price includes smart sync, which lets you choose a folder to always remain offline. This is handy for my large archive of PDFs. I don’t usually need to have them when I’m not online and can save some disk space.

The Road Forward

I am willing to take the hit on Scrivener at this point if it means moving off Dropbox. Of the apps I use, it is the only one that solely syncs with Dropbox1. I have given myself a few action items before the new OSs are are released this fall.

  • Continue to work and see if pinning continues to work to keep files synced for offline access;
  • Work on moving writing away from Scrivener and into Pages/Ulysses;
  • Take a hard look at that large PDF archive and see if it needs to reside in the cloud.
  1. AutoCAD is the other app that doesn’t use iCloud, but I don’t use the iPad app much. ↩

iPad Life: On a Keyboard Failure Making Me Rethink an Entire Workflow

I have used the Apple Smart Keyboard as my main keyboard for my 12.9” iPad Pro since I bought the device in January 2016. Unfortunately, they are not reliable as I have gone through two of them in that period. I went to Apple to try and plead for swapping out the second carcass but failed.

I love creating on my iPad. It is perfect for writing and drawing with. The Smart Keyboard worked well for me as it was easy to flip around from writing mode to drawing mode and it didn’t add too much weight to the device. It also charged from the iPad and I didn’t need to worry about pairing with Bluetooth.

The Smart Keyboard’s death, however, triggered a long tail of analysis.

The first thought is iOS 13 stands a chance at being a sea change for iPad productivity. I am not sure of two things: whether those changes will make a meaningful difference to how I use iOS; and if those changes work on my iPad Pro. If the answers to both of those are yes, I will likely get something like the Brydge keyboard1 for my iPad and call it a day. If the changes are amazing but don’t work on my iPad, later this year I will look at getting a new iPad Pro2. If the changes don’t improve my use if the iPad, I will take a long look at what the iPad means to my creative life.

There is always a lot of discussion about iPads as laptop replacements, but to get a new iPad Pro setup that mimics what I use now costs about $1,600. That is well towards 13” MacBook Pro prices. If you take out the Pencil, it’s pretty close since the 256GB MacBook Pro is $1,500. At that point, if I drop that kind of money I simply want my iPad to do more than it can now. Little things, like use a mouse and keyboard3, and access data on USB drives. Right now, the new iPad Pros don’t solve $1,600’s worth of problems.

All of the keyboard cases — save the Smart Keyboard — are a form factor that make the iPad more laptop-like, but at the sacrifice of the flexibility of quickly switching to tablet mode. The closest I have seen is the Brydge keyboard, but that one still requires you to remove the iPad from the keyboard to use it in tablet mode. If I am just going to jam the iPad into that style of encasement I wonder if just using my actual laptop is a better option.

Until the WWDC keynote I am not buying another keyboard for my iPad, which means until then I am trying to work off the virtual keyboard as much as possible. Right now it is a tough slog but we will see how that goes. I have a spare Bluetooth keyboard I could use, but I prefer to keep my keyboard and iPad as a singular unit. One thing I do like about the virtual keyboard is just having the tablet flat on the table and not reaching up to use the interface is amazing.

  1. Or, yes, another Smart Keyboard. They aren’t reliable but they work best for the way I use my iPad. ↩
  2. The biggest disappointment would be if USB-drives are only available on USB-c iPads. ↩
  3. The main use case is using our Virtual Desktop system at work. ↩

On Apple’s Earning Adjustment and Upgrade Cycles

Apple today announced expected revenue for the holiday quarter would fall short of expectations. They didn’t miss by much, only by about $5-7 billion1. Tim Cook blamed a lot of things: China’s slow growth, longer upgrade cycles due to the elimination of cellular subsidies, and that people paying $29 to replace old batteries allowed them to keep their iPhones longer2.

What he didn’t mention was Apple raised the prices on everything over the last few years.

Now, some of the complaining about prices wasn’t justified. The new MacBook Air starts at $1,199, up $200 from the old-model’s $999 price tag. That old Air, however, was outdated. No Retina screen. Old internals. It did have MagSafe and USB-A ports, so for a lot of people it was still worth it.

The price increase on a lot of other items, yeah. I bought my 2016 15” MacBook Pro in March 2017. It replaced as my main Mac a 2011 15” MacBook Pro, and an 11” MacBook Air I bought in early 2015 right before Apple released new upgrades. The 2011 I farmed off to a co-worker; the 11” I still have3. While performance was a driver for the upgrade, a large part of it was getting a Retina screen. The 12.9” iPad Pro really made the older screens hard for me to use. I sometimes wonder if I got a 2014 13” Pro instead if it would still be my main Mac. The dual core processor would likely show its age by now. I still use the Air though, when I need MacOS and an ultra-portable computer.

My theme for 2019 Evaluation. For the record, I’m not looking at making major life changes. I am, however, evaluating the devices, apps, and services I use. For now, it’s a lot of data collection. What do I use my Mac and iPad for? I say I want to use x app more, but over the year I use y app instead. I promised myself it was unlikely I was going to upgrade any of my devices. Some of this is price. The increased price of the new iPad Pro may not have completely turned me away, but also needing to buy a new Smart Keyboard and Pencil (also at a roughly 20% price premium) surely did. The same with my iPhone. I used my 6 for three years, and I expect to get 4-5 out of my 8 Plus. New iPhones are more expensive and my existing one works just fine. For me to upgrade I need to see real-world improvement; not just benchmarked improvement.

As Patrick Rhone would say, a lot of people are finding out their current phones and devices are enough.

  1. Since this is the internet, I feel I need to mention I am being sarcastic. ↩
  2. I am not making that one up. ↩
  3. It’s on my desk next to me, actually. ↩