RANT: Apple will never get laptops right

I'm reacting to this headline: "Apple Plans to Make the iPad More Like a Laptop and Less Like a Phone". It's wishful thinking, rather than reporting.

Bloomberg published this story right before the WWDC, Apple’s developer conference. I have the same iPad shown in the article (different color): iPad Pro with Apple’s own Magic Keyboard. It doesn’t work. It will never work.

Welcome to my desk; don’t mind the clutter and note that the iPad Pro is sitting there so I can take a photo not because I actually use it.

An iPad Is Not A Laptop, and never will be. Apple would have to change their historical inability to understand productivity users on the go. The company is so fixated on making super cool-looking devices that challenge our assumptions about the physics of design that they miss really basic stuff.

First a little of my computer-using history: I used a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro as a portable computer for several years. But Apple’s laptop computers, while beautiful to look at and watch media on, are a bear to use for anyone (like me) with big hands and fingers and a desire to type fast to keep up. The keyboard is a typical Apple keyboard, apparently designed to help the user type slowly (because of the placement of keys and absence of useful function keys.)

When I rested my hands on the touchpad below the keyboard, the cursor jumped randomly to different places than where I thought I was typing. Since I didn’t look at the screen and the keyboard at the same time (really hard to do!), I looked up from time to time to find whole sections of text had disappeared or got scrambled.

Yes, my hands are THAT big. I don’t know why, but I assume that the sensors in the touchpad extend under the metal sheath, and the outside palm of my hands apply enough pressure to trigger them randomly. But I don’t care anymore because I have since retired my several attempts to use Apple’s laptop computers entirely. In doing so, I discovered that I can type faster with my thumbs on my iPhone, and it weighs a whole lot less.

For some period of time, I carried a small iPad in my travels for watching video and reading books on Kindle, as well as having email and calendar available. Very convenient. But I kept reading that perhaps a bigger iPad with a keyboard would be more like a laptop. Hence this rant.

Fact: IOS has never had a full keyboard-driven user interface. The iPhone started out as a piece of glass that uses your fingers as a pointing and pressing device. This was brilliant for a small piece of glass, and millions of people have accommodated to and learned that system. It even worked well with a small iPad, but when you make the screen larger (as in the iPad Pro), the dynamic changes. And when you start thinking that it could be like a laptop, it breaks down completely.

So goes the thinking (read the linked story): make the iPad work like a laptop and give it a keyboard. But you can’t do this by making incremental changes in each model year. It isn’t “just” making the OS multitasking (which IOS already is, by the way; it’s just not obvious how to do more than one task at a time). It isn’t just making apps appear in windows, which overwhelms the simple action model designed for the iPhone. You have to start over with a new design principle, regardless of OS, and make it integrated and based on the physical characteristics of the device.

I’ve been carrying my iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard on my travels for last few months, thinking that at least when I have desk under it, I can figure out how to type emails and use spreadsheets and files in a reasonably productive manner. Nope; I actually have written some of my best long emails on my iPhone, because I know exactly how to control the interface and didn’t have to sit at a desk to do it or move my eyes on and off the screen.

In order to use an iPad with a keyboard you must constantly lift your hand off the keyboard and touch the screen. You can’t be productive if you’re trying to coordinate your hand, your eyes, the keyboard and the screen! I haven’t measured it, but I estimate that I type at least 30% slower on my iPad with a keyboard than on a computer with a full keyboard and even slower than with my thumbs on an iPhone.

The so-called Magic Keyboard ain’t magical at all; Apple has moved the keys around even from its own desktop keyboards and failed to include an Escape key in the upper left corner (which is a default key in most desktop productivity applications for canceling an unintended action). There is a cursor on screen (a dim grey circle) that you can move around with the track pad on the Magic Keyboard, but it acts unpredictably and is really hard to center and commit to a specific spot on the screen.

I’ve tried, really hard, to be productive on the iPad Pro but now it sits in my backpack on the plane or unused on my room or on my home desk, unless I want to watch a movie. But it’s heavy enough (around 3 pounds) that I am considering going back to a small iPad with no keyboard just for reading books and watching video. (I can’t believe that I used to the iPhone, the iPad Mini AND the MacBook Pro.)

So, 40+ years after starting to use a Macintosh (with two diversions to Windows), I can no longer believe that Apple will ever focus on a productivity user as the design center for a portable computer. They never have, never will. #thumbsrule