Back to Mac

Introduction

Almost eight and a half years ago, I switched to using an iPad as my full-time computer, having come from decades of having Macs.

In recent years we did get an emergency-use shared/household M2 MacBook Air, which my wife would occasionally take out of the cupboard. Now, that laptop has become my computer.

I’m reminded of YouTubers who say that they tried using something as their main whatever for a whole week; well, I did it for eight years. Allow me to report back.

iPad-only

I began with a 9.7-inch iPad Pro, then moved to the 10.5, then to the largest model and stayed there, upgrading every couple of years, always with the Pro line. My current iPad is the M4 13-inch. It’s a nice iPad, if largely undifferentiated from prior models — but that’s Apple devices for you. And I used it for everything I needed to do.

Besides all the usual computer-y things like email and web and messaging and entertainment and social and clerical stuff, I used it for:

(People are always interested in apps, so briefly: Ulysses for writing etc, the Affinity suite for graphical stuff, Textastic and Drafts for programming and automation, Secure Shellfish as a terminal, Logic for music or sometimes Cubasis, Final Cut for video, and the preinstalled apps for most other things.)

Suffice to say then, that this was not a dalliance. The iPad was my one and only computer. I didn’t use a Mac for anything, unless I absolutely had to grab one for 5 minutes to get something done like flashing a new firmware onto a mechanical keyboard, or doing something on the (thankfully increasingly rare) web site that truly requires Chrome. Those recourses were countable on the fingers of one hand, per year. Until very recently, I don’t think I’d used a Mac in more than a year.

I was happy with the iPad Pro. I enjoyed using it, because I’d adapted to it. I quit the Mac cold turkey in late 2016, shutting my MacBook down and stashing it out of sight. I had a monthly recurring reminder for a while to charge it and boot it up for long enough to back itself up, but after six months of that I just deleted the reminder and sold the computer.

I loved the slab of glass, and the Apple Pencils of each generation. I loved that I could rotate it, and write on it, and pinch-zoom it, and connect it to a keyboard, and just figuratively hug the thing. It was most certainly The Future, and very much on track to become everyone’s full-time computer after another few versions of the OS. Then another few versions. Then another few.

I believed in the promise of the form factor and the interaction language, and the human-focused nature of the device, so much that I made iPad-only a part of my identity. And I really was happy. But eventually, without me really noticing, things started to happen.

The path back

My setup for the iPad was always the same. I’d use the Magic Keyboard or smart keyboard folio if I was away from my desk, but during working hours I had the iPad raised up on my desk to an ergonomic level, with an external keyboard connected. Latterly I also had a pointing device, which was sometimes a mouse, sometimes a trackpad, and sometimes a trackball. The keyboards varied enormously.

If I needed to use the Pencil, I’d take the iPad over to the couch in my office across from my desk. While I did have a small (15-inch) additional display on my desk, it was essentially for my Nintendo Switch. Display support on iPadOS was either absent, or mirroring, or very buggy versions of Stage Manager until relatively recently, so I didn’t bother with it. The focus was a benefit, and nothing really changed when I put the iPad in a keyboard case and took it elsewhere. I worked for years that way.

A year or two ago, I started to get very into e-ink tablets, and I’ve now wholly settled on the Supernote platform. I love these digital notebooks, and while I wasn’t conscious of it at first, they immediately replaced all my usage of the Apple Pencil, and the iPad apps that I used the Pencil for — like GoodNotes, or later Notability. For any other use of a pointing device, the trackpad or whatever was just fine. Without fanfare, the Pencil became a permanent attachment to the top edge of the iPad.

When I upgraded to the M4 iPad Pro, another change took place. Instead of fetching the iPad’s keyboard case from a drawer or cupboard each evening, I decided to just get the kind of laptop riser that would let me leave the iPad connected to its keyboard permanently, letting me just unplug the single thunderbolt cable which powered it and connected it to my CalDigit dock, and walk away. This had the interesting additional effect that my iPad now never separated from its keyboard case, either. Most of the time I wouldn’t even fold it shut for the quick trip downstairs.

Next, my wife realised that she could do with a second monitor to use with her work MacBook Pro in her home office, and duly bought a 4K 27-inch Dell model, which I VESA-mounted to her desk. Every time I would walk past her office or go in, which was daily, I’d admire the thing. Just the expanse of bright, well-saturated space, and of course the convenience of USB-C for power and the video signal. I was really glad that she had it, and I remarked on how great it looked at least a couple of times a week. But my own mindset — and prior experience with Stage Manager on the iPad — didn’t permit me to consider that it might be a good idea to get one for my own desk. About a year passed that way, until one day, on a whim, when my wife was out at work I took my iPad to her desk and connected it up to the monitor, just to play with the setup. It really wasn’t bad, and Stage Manager (while still troublingly idiosyncratic) was much less proscriptive than I remembered regarding the positions of windows.

I wrestled with the idea for a week or so, and then with my wife’s encouragement, we acquired another of the monitors, for me to use. The iPad is still weird with external displays, and often puts things where you don’t want them. Lots of apps also just aren’t suited to that setup either, notably Final Cut Pro for iPadOS. It just puts the same-sized interface in a window on the huge screen, with choppy playback in the preview pane for some reason. Any attempt to increase the size of the window just scales up the entire thing, resulting in gigantic icons and sliders, and no additional visibility of the timeline or such. In fairness, though, Logic doesn’t suffer from that limitation, and nor do most of the preinstalled apps. The problem was the unpredictability. Some of my daily-use apps I just kept on the iPad’s own display because there was no advantage to moving them over to the monitor. After the expense of buying it, I admit that the situation grated on me a little — but it was still refreshingly versatile compared to using the iPad on its own for so many years.

As part of the preparation for the monitor arriving — during a scant 30 hours, direct from Dell — I rearranged my desk. Instead of the iPad being central, with my prior 15-inch monitor on the left, I swapped things around. The 27-inch monitor is in the centre, suspended above the rear edge of the desk, top edge at eye height; the iPad, still in its keyboard case, is on the laptop riser off to the left, angled inwards and lowered so that my Sony Alpha camera can peek over the top of it at a good height for to-camera recording. I had to get some external speakers too, because the built-in speakers in monitors are uniformly poor, and particularly because iPadOS of course offers no way to specify that you still want sound to come from the iPad itself even when a speakers-equipped monitor is connected. At least the USB-C technology allowed for USB audio to be fed directly via the monitor, not even requiring the use of a port on my dock. Small graces.

At this point, dear reader, you may fairly have concluded alea iacta est — and I’d be lying if I denied any flickers of recognition when looking at my newly-reconfigured desk. The resemblance to my wife’s setup downstairs, especially given that the desks themselves are also identical, was undeniable. But still: iPad-only! My point of pride, or obstinacy, or perhaps they’re always two faces of the same thing anyway.

In the end, it took 4 days.

A very small part of the blame lies with my thunderbolt dock. It’s just so convenient. A single cable, plugged into one side of the iPad (while still in its keyboard case, like a laptop, and sitting on an angled laptop riser suitable for a 15-inch computer), providing power, access to the big monitor, speakers, my Sony camera, my MIDI controller keyboard, and my mechanical keyboard. Just one thing to connect — or to disconnect. Is it any wonder that, just a few days later, I decided to try putting the MacBook in the iPad’s place, and connecting that same single cable?

The Mac’s OS was already up to date, because we’re fastidious about that. From the Apple TV to the phones and iPads, and even the heretofore-languishing Mac, everything gets updated to the latest version. We have two Comp Sci degrees in this house, and while my son is only four years old, I wouldn’t entirely rule out a third in the future, if they still exist. I even already had an account to log into, because we migrated both of our previous Macs onto this single one when we got it, before getting rid of those old machines. There was no friction from that point of view. And my brain willingly supplied all the keyboard shortcuts from decades of Mac use, especially since many of them are used for corresponding functions on the iPad anyway.

So what’s the difference?

iPads with respect to Macs

Here are some observations. They may not be yours, but they are mine. I can assure you that I’ve done my homework, and that I’ve given both platforms a fair chance. Nor am I going to pronounce a winner, not just because that notion presupposes a homogeneity of usage and need which doesn’t reflect the diversity of reality, and also not just because the two platforms possess both shared and heterogeneous properties not facilitating reductive comparison, but because it’s stupid. There doesn’t need to be a winner. Let’s learn that single lesson one of these centuries.

In the meantime, please implicitly prefix all of the following with the phrase you should always implicitly prefix anyone’s opinion with: “In my opinion”.

iPads are slower than Macs, subjectively, and almost regardless of hardware. I’m most recently comparing an M2 MacBook with an M4 iPad, but the experience is the opposite of what the hardware might naively suggest. iPadOS is fluid, but the thing with fluids is that they only move just so quickly.

The thing is, there’s a lot of momentary waiting with an iPad. Waiting for it to disambiguate a tap from a swipe or a scroll, or from a tap-hold or a drag; waiting for it to do its required ritual animations in the summoning or banishing of an app or a section of UI; waiting for it to thaw or resurrect a process that fell foul of its ferociously aggressive limits on things running in the background. Everything goes at a glitzy demo’s pace, rather than at an I-already-know-what-I’m-doing pace. If you think of your tasks like the words in a sentence, the spaces between them are longer on an iPad, like fully-justified text that’s expanding to fill the line. It’s definitely bearable, but it adds up.

I’m a very heavy user of the keyboard, and I prefer to use a pointing device as infrequently as possible, precisely because it’s slow. I trigger menu items via the keyboard, navigate with the keyboard, and so on. On the iPad, keyboard navigation — and in particular, keyboard focus — are regularly unreliable. The problem is twice as bad with Stage Manager enabled, and another twice as bad if you add an external monitor while using Stage Manager. Apps routinely open, or become frontmost, without acquiring keyboard focus. More vexingly, it’s common enough for an app to lose the keyboard focus immediately after I typed something, especially if some transient interface had been invoked. Writing in Ulysses, then using the Find command with its floating text field before dismissing that field, would fairly regularly result in the app behaving as if it were non-frontmost with regard to the keyboard focus. To say that this was frustrating would be… not how I’d put it.

Presumably because of the legacy and the architecture of iPadOS, many activities simply fail if not kept frontmost. Take Final Cut Pro, for example; a first-party app which you’d assume would have every available privilege and priority, especially given its resource-intensive workflows. After triggering the export of a video project, doing anything which moved Final Cut from frontmost status causes the export to fail, instantly. My routine for export videos was this:

A similar workflow was needed for uploading those videos to YouTube. All the enhancements of Stage Manager and fancy hardware are rendered impotent by situations like those, and not for lack of processing power.

Then there are the many things that simply aren’t possible, because everything on iPadOS is locked down. The reasons for those limitations might be to ensure performance, to ensure security, or to ensure profit-extraction, but they’re probably a mixture of all three. In any case, most types of third-party customisation from the Mac are unavailable, and you largely have to just accept Apple’s way of doing things — whatever that might be in a given version of the OS. And to be honest, that was mostly fine with me.

Like many people of my background (and my nationality), I have a bit of a Calvinist streak. I’ve tried not to use things, or enjoy things, because of how I’d feel if they were taken away from me later. I have a strong affinity with standard, pre-installed apps, default preferences, and officially-supported use cases. The iPad embodies that sort of thinking, because you only get exactly what you’re given, or what you’re offered.

Apple likes to present the iPad as the first computer that’s designed to suit the user, but of course the exact opposite is also true: in every respect, the user must adapt to the iPad’s way of doing things. It, along with any other locked-down, walled-garden, highly-opinionated device, is a my way or the highway scenario.

And finally, the little paper cuts which, intentionally or otherwise, make things just a little bit harder. The iPad has no concept of the main screen as a configurable option when a monitor is connected, for example, which often confounds window-placement. It also has a number of competing concepts of the focus, which have been added at different times and in different forms, and few of which seem to ever be in synchronisation. There’s the touch or pointer focus, the keyboard focus, the frontmost window of the frontmost app, and an assortment of accessibility focuses including that of VoiceOver. There’s a lot of accidental typing into nowhere, or of sending events to an app which appears frontmost in the app switcher, but which certainly isn’t so in terms of which process is seeing your input. Annoying.

There’s also my most often-seen alert: the one that says something like “Cannot use accessory; this accessory uses too much power”. It happens mostly when a USB keyboard is connected which has a slightly higher (but still entirely normal and supported) power draw, like an RGB-backlit model. Whenever there’s a new major iPadOS (something-point-zero) release, I knew I’d be getting the alert (usually in groups of two, about a minute apart) about a third to a half of the time I plugged the iPad into the thunderbolt dock. When Apple releases the something-point-zero-point-one version, the frequency drops by a factor of five, or even ten — but it still happens. This has been true for maybe five years now, with assorted iPads, keyboards, and so on.

The entries in the Files app from files providers will mysteriously stop working and need to be re-created, which takes less than a minute, but is still a hassle. Once in a while, a reboot is needed in order to get back onto wifi (for years, with different broadband providers, home networking setups, iPads, and iPadOS versions). And my own favourite, which Apple themselves couldn’t offer a solution for beyond erasing the iPad: Screen Time indicating that the device wakes its screen for six minutes exactly, every hour of the day and night, and which I suspect to be an underestimation since I’d often come into my office to find the display illuminated and showing the lock screen.

Anyone who uses an iPad a lot knows that this is just part of the background noise of the platform, and that all platforms have corresponding irritations. They’re not arguments against those platforms. But when taken in the surrounding context of an inability to customise or to inspect or to personally implement recourse, their effects can feel amplified.

None of this is to say that the Mac is by comparison a utopia, or my years there halcyon; just that the characteristics of its own friction are rather different.

Macs with respect to iPads

The first thing that struck me when coming back to the Mac was how little, overall, had changed. Everything is still where it used to be, and old isolated weirdnesses are, for the most part, now just no longer isolated because there are new ones alongside them.

The second thing that struck me is how much more needy macOS is, not just compared to iPadOS, but compared to its own past selves. In the process of adding some apps and some utilities — most of which, in all fairness, do require uncommon privileges in order to manipulate the interface and its behaviour — I quickly lost count of the number of notifications telling me that something had been installed somewhere, or that a login item had been added, or that something was asking for permission to do something, and I could go and approve it or change it somewhere else.

Safari needs micro-managing for each new site that has the temerity to let me download something I wanted to download, and for a while the experience seemed to descend almost to farce. I can imagine a right-leaning comedian putting together some lazy material about woke computers relentlessly seeking explicit consent for every action, and virtue-signalling their compliance. It’s intrusive and quite fatiguing.

The reality is that there’s no solution to these security concerns that’s both easy and desirable, so what we’re left with is the license agreement anti-pattern, magnified a hundred times. Yes, of course I want the thing to do the thing; it’s why I installed it. Yes, of course I agree that I just clicked Agree without reading the agreement.

Macs are much quicker to use than iPads, in terms of the responsiveness of every little part of the interface and the interactions. They’re all slower than they used to be, of course, because there are now animation timing curves built into everything, but the two platforms are still starkly different in that regard. The problem, though, is that the Mac offers far, far more to fiddle with at all times. An order of magnitude more, when you consider menu systems and UI density. That’s a kind of distraction, and it’s omnipresent. The OS is built for capability, not focus, and I suspect that most people have more trouble with the latter.

There’s also the issue that, as a natural consequence of the increased ability to customise and modify things, Macs decay in a way that iPads generally don’t. They need to be nursed to an extent, and conflict-managed, and spring cleaned. The worst I’ve had to do with an iPad is to erase its network settings; on a Mac, a fresh installation every couple of years is beneficial and desirable. It’s nobody’s fault but my own, but there it is nonetheless.

Then there’s the visual aspect. Everything on a Mac is much smaller, and it’s all closer together. Macs also don’t look quite so good. There’s something in the colour choices, and the type rendering, and the tiny iconography. They feel a year or two older, even on the latest versions of everything. It’s like the best designers are all assigned to the mobile devices, and of course that makes perfect sense. The Mac has hand-me-down aesthetics in a number of ways, and a lot of that is due to the inevitable baggage of its much longer history.

Then there’s the downside of functional flexibility: everything on the screen does multiple things, and reacts to hovering and right-clicking and click-holding and dragging, usually in different ways. Everything has help associated with it, because density and comprehensiveness are the particular religion of desktop operating systems; the hallmark of seriousness. People forget that being a big-boy computer has been a chip on the shoulder of the Mac for far, far longer than that of the iPad.

And of course there are the little annoyances here, too. Explicit unmounting of external volumes. No Face ID at all, which I wasn’t aware of — I was shocked to find that thumbprints are the only option, even on brand new MacBook Pros. Coming from iOS, it feels like going back in time in that regard. Oh, and the launchers and window-management mechanisms; so many! And some mutually incompatible, yet all baked into the OS. There are even multiple automation facilities, of different generations, all of which are still concurrently supported. Sometimes, the opposite of opinionated design isn’t flexibility; it’s indecision. I’m starting to feel good about the chances of OpenDoc coming back.

Macs, then, are supremely high-maintenance compared to iPads, by a huge margin. But you get a lot in return, so: swings and roundabouts.

Where does that leave me?

On the changing of people and things

Humans have a cognitive bias whereby we prefer, or assess more positively, things that are familiar to us. We have many more cognitive biases too, and they’re all probably advantageous from a strictly evolutionary perspective, but I think it’s our duty to try and moderate their effect on us. I’m not saying that I actually do that personally, but, you know, you probably should.

To my eye, the Mac hasn’t changed very much, though it has gained a lot of alternative (and simultaneously-available) ways of doing things. If the iPad is opinionated to the extreme, the Mac has few opinions on anything except that yes, you absolutely should indeed be able to do any of those things, but it reserves the right to nag you about it.

The iPad hasn’t changed very much either, though it has gained various simulacra of things that people like me wanted; namely the things we did on a laptop. But it’s still a touch-first device, and it still prioritises interactive feedback over true responsiveness. The iPad functions at finger-scale and finger-speed, brilliantly so. Every approach that it makes towards computer-ness must necessarily be attenuated by, and ultimately run aground upon that design axiom.

I, however, have definitely changed. Since I last used a Mac full-time in October of 2016, I’ve smashed through the Big Four-Oh age barrier and gone halfway towards fifty. Things generally hurt more, I get injured more readily, and those injuries take appallingly longer to heal. I wear varifocals now, and I’ve become reacquainted with asthma inhalers. I have a little gadget that trims nose- and ear-hair, and I need it often enough that it sits beside the floss dispenser.

I’ve also written several novels. I’ve become a father, and my son will be going to school this year. I’ve had a lot of therapy. And there was/is the pandemic, of course. Plus <gestures vaguely at everything going on in the world>.

I’m not the same man, but nor have all my various trajectories been aligned.

I love the iPad. I love its fluidness, and its cleverness, and how beautiful its interface and hardware are. I love the omnipresent footprints of humane and truly considered interaction design. I love the innovation that runs through every aspect of it. I love its vibrancy and playfulness, and its aspirational DNA. I love that it responds to touch, and I love the way that its ubiquitous embrace of animation and interaction lends it an eager and, dare I say, even companionable quality.

I do not love its limitations — and there are many. When you use an iPad as I have, full-time as your sole computer for more than eight years, sooner or later you start to notice a sort of boundary, or perimeter. It’s of irregular shape, and it wends its way through the design of iPadOS and its applications, first-party or otherwise.

It’s the boundary between empowerment and workaround — and a significant minority of the iPad’s functionality is the product of finding workarounds for doing things that the underlying design and architecture (and interaction model) had already implicitly rejected. There’s an endless list of examples, and they touch on everything from clipboards, to multi-tasking, to file providers, to shared device drivers, and all the rest.

An awful lot of iPadOS is the innovation of concessions against simplicity, and towards functionality.

The iPad doesn’t have a clear product vision, if it has one at all. It’s not a phone, and it’s not a desktop computer. Those two device categories are defined by what they do, but incongruously, the tablet category is conspicuously defined by the rather abstract attribute of its form factor. What is a tablet, then, functionally speaking? It’s a thing that does some of what a computer does and most of what a phone does. That’s an odd bit of market segmentation. Perhaps it’s even a warning sign.

Then, consider that almost all of the iPad’s development direction has been towards adding computer-like features (if not computer-like implementations or interaction models). I can only assume that those developments are due to a combination of customer feedback and management decisions. And if both of those forces are pointing in the same direction, and that direction is notionally counter to the core thrust of the product’s design ethos, shouldn’t someone be asking the question?

You know the one: Who is this actually for?

That the iPad is a real computer is not in doubt. That you can create artworks and books and music and movies and software on an iPad is not in doubt. I’ve done it! For a great many people, yes, it’s just a fancy TV and games console and web browser at the premium end of the market. But you can do so much with it… if you’re willing to let it define all the boundaries, and indeed the workflows too.

I was perfectly happy, and even evangelical, about using my iPad Pro for everything — complete with adaption after adaption, workaround after workaround, and compromise after compromise, with the satisfaction coming from just being able to do things against my expectations — for years. Then a simple chain of events took place, almost without my conscious notice.

When I unplugged the thunderbolt cable from my M4 iPad Pro and lifted the device, still attached to its Magic Keyboard as always, from the laptop stand, it could have been almost any evening of the last eight years. But instead of taking the iPad to the couch opposite or downstairs to the living room or dining table, I set it to one side, and put a MacBook in its place. Then I plugged in the same cable.

I knew within half an hour that, while no mistakes had been made either in 2016 or now, I wasn’t going to put the iPad back on the stand again.

I think that a lot of macOS is artless, and clumsy, and ugly. I think it’s a great big polished barnacle with years upon years of revolving-door product managers and fads and directives and vocal legacy users and all of that stuff, all baked up inside it. I think that mobile OS design is eating away at it, every bit as much as the one is enhancing the other. I think it’s damned weird, and if anything it’s more idiosyncratic now than when I was last using it daily. It has “inertia” written all over it.

But there’s no question what its values are, and its vision. It predates all of those soupy, post-millennial concepts. It’s a professional desktop operating system, just with a turtleneck instead of a tie.

It’s also fast, and flexible, and customisable, and stable, and — for the moment, until and unless Apple has their usual way — it’s open to tinkering and fiddling around under the hood, and putting your own stuff on there without paying a constant tithe to some half-a-world-away stakeholders. And it’s a full, first-class Computer Platform, where you know that virtually everything you could want to put on it or plug into it will be supported.

It’s not delightful, or pretty, or aspirational, or innovative. But it’s usable, in the broad sense of the word. iPads are more approachable computers, and more focused computers. They are not, however, more usable computers — because ease of use isn’t just a matter of simplicity or intuitiveness, but also capability. An absent feature is unusable by definition. Sometimes, an opinionated design is a limitation.

And so I find myself here, back where it all began, and I have to accept that this is all my own doing.

When I was “just” writing books, the iPad was a gift. But when you choose to add in things like music production, video editing, tinkering with servers, a bit of programming on the side, and pushing beyond the casual hobbyist level with hardware and so on, suddenly walls materialise — and none of it is strictly the platform’s fault. I’d stop short of saying that the iPad made it clear all along what it was, and who it was for, because that’s patently not the case: Apple has never made that clear, because I don’t think they know the answer themselves. But I could see enough nonetheless.

Am I delighted to be back on macOS? God no. What a sad thing to be delighted about. Am I glad to be rid of the iPad? Also no; I’m keeping the iPad, albeit now in search of a role, and I dearly love the device and the platform. And nor am I claiming that I’ve outgrown it, because that’s the kind of binary simplification that doesn’t stand up to any kind of intellectual rigour.

Let me try to express something closer to the truth. For what I need to do, the iPad is completely adequate, and is a delightful, hopeful thing. For what I want to do, though, (and I acknowledge that the mismatch is of my own making), the iPad has ultimately out-frictioned me, at least for the time being. It has tried so very hard to be something that it really isn’t, in the service of people like myself who must necessarily conceptualise their computing needs using that ubiquitous human cognitive bias of preference for the familiar.

The period during which the iPad was sufficient for my needs was perhaps the most emotionally satisfying — and principled — portion of my computer-using adult life. As things stand, however, that period has largely elapsed. And, I find myself concerned that those erstwhile needs are a straightforward subset of a larger product identity which itself still seems to be mostly undefined.

None of that is true for the Mac. It’s satisfying in the conventional way, in that it meets needs without drama or acrobatics. It works in the sense that it marshals its resources firmly in the direction of service, rather than theatre. It’s flexible not as a shape-shifting device of modularity and digital magic, but in the unassuming and reliable way that its answer is invariably yes. For me, that’s more than enough of a recommendation.

And so help me, it is familiar.