MacBook Neo and How the iPad Should Be
craigmod.com55 points by jen729w 8 hours ago
55 points by jen729w 8 hours ago
I've used Mac for 20 years and iPad on&off for 10 years.. largely I agree with Craig. Touch on MacOS is basically useless, you won't realize this until you try using an iPad like a MacBook for an extended period of time. Reaching up from keyboard/trackpad to touch the screen quickly gets fatiguing. It is not ergonomic.
The iPad is meant to be used in touch mode while in your hands generally. If they were brave they'd stop pretending, strip the iPad back to its roots and make it the best touch-first experience they could.
Trying to make iPad+keyboard case a Mac replacement is an exercise in futility. Similar size/weight to a MacBook at that point, and just not as fluid as MacOS. All the Mac-like stuff (keyboard/trackpad/multitasking/keyboard shortcuts) feels bolted on. All the battery/memory management makes it feel a little flakier and less responsive than a Macbook.
This is why I’ve never understood the demand for a touchscreen on a laptop. All of my non-Mac laptops have touchscreens, and I basically never use the touch feature except by accident (e.g. a kid pointing and asking a question and causing some code to highlight).
I think the best use cases of iPad are basically bifurcated into:
1) Consumption device People reading, scrolling, watching videos. Nice on the sofa, in bed, whatever. Also this use case has a lot of older users driven by eyesight issues that make a bigger slightly further screen interface better. Also very intuitive to young children (funny how often this elderly/youth overlap rears its head).
2) Creative (not productivity/coding!) device Artists needing pencil & touch interface for precise tactile writing/drawing/editing
This person nails it.
The part about Procreate is really spot on. If you draw on the iPad, and I do, Procreate just dissolves under your fingers and pencil. It's like working with paper and pencil. Almost. And it has Undo. Tactile feedback would be nice, but I'm not sure what that means. Paper and pencil has great tactile feedback. Trying to describe it with words is an exercise in frustration. If you don't draw, or write with a pen, ever, then I'm at a loss to explain it.
But it's there nonetheless.
We've got a long way to go to really understand UI and UX. A long, long way.
Now, please excuse me while I go and tap dance about architecture for a bit...
> Tactile feedback would be nice, but I'm not sure what that means.
Modern Mac trackpads don’t really click, they vibrate upon sensing a certain amount of force, and the sensory illusion is good enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing.
I’m only suggesting this tongue-in-cheek, but perhaps there’ll come a time when the Apple Pencil can micro-vibrate in such a way that is so convincing it will make you feel as if you’re dragging it on paper with configurable roughness.
The Neo does have true tactile feedback, but you're correct for the other MacBooks.
The part that makes ipadOS feels like a toy is Apple’s iron grip in “App Store only” app delivery. The thing has so much power, but to do anything useful, you gotta play by Apple’s rules. All that dream of quirky, useful, innovative ipadOS leveraging apps would show up if they relinquished that software control and let indie or otherwise apps get there without the Apple Tax both in money and rules.
Would the iPad still be that days long, cohesive device is another story.. it Apple cannot have their cake and eat it too.
Touchscreens suck for text manipulation. The keyboard and the mouse are the superior input devices for wrangling characters and words and lines and paragraphs.
The author wants using the iPad to “feel like a finger ballet, your hands swooping and swiping”, but also the author seems to care a lot about emails and Claude Code and writing. Those are fundamentally at odds, and it makes complete sense that they’re very happy with a MacBook Neo instead (but they could have just been using a MacBook Air the whole time).
The iPad is fantastic for, as the author points out, “reading the news and watching YouTube and playing games”, and it’s an amazing tool for digital artists and anyone who does lots of hand annotation work. So really overall a product that’s found its niche, and when I see grandpas and grandmas and students at my local cafe using their iPad their hands are effectively swooping and swiping in a finger ballet.
I think there’s just a kind of techie who desperately wishes they could do everything on an iPad, but really the machine meant for them is a lightweight MacBook (Neo or Air), and for some reason that induces some sort of frustration in them and they feel like things somehow shouldn’t be that way. I guess I get it, the iPad hardware is pretty slick. But yeah, your work makes you a MacBook person, not an iPad person, that’s just how it is. (Apple should make an 11” MacBook again though).
> iPad apps should be weird as hell, unlike anything you find on a desktop operating system […] The iPad should be a highly-focused touch playground. Weird as hell, one-of-a-kind apps
I don’t know what this obsession with “weird apps” is, but 99.9% of people don’t care about “weird apps” and so that’s not enough to justify a whole device category (and you can find weird apps on all platforms anyways).
> The iPad is fantastic for, as the author points out, “reading the news and watching YouTube and playing games”
> I think there’s just a kind of techie who desperately wishes they could do everything on an iPad, but really the machine meant for them is a lightweight MacBook (Neo or Air)
Couldn't agree more. I am that person. I spent months deliberating before buying an 11" iPad (with keyboard). Used it for a week for the novelty. But the keyboard, trackpad, and multi-tasking is so janky compared to my Mac that it's sat in a cupboard ever since.
The MacBook Air is so quick and light that it's always just as convenient to get the MacBook out instead.
And that's not even for 'techie' tasks. Basic note-taking, researching, and simple spreadsheets are all easier on the Mac. The only time I reach for the iPad is if I want to watch a video and my girlfriend is already using the TV.
That being said, the iPad mini is a perfect companion if you do want an iPad but already have a decent MacBook. Such a great form-factor and doesn't pretend to be a laptop replacement.
The difference for me has been the Apple Pencil. Now I don’t view the iPad as trying to replicate the mouse and keyboard experience, because it’s something different. For notes, brainstorming, research ideas—something where I don’t want a keyboard—the iPad with Pencil has been excellent.
I’ve tried three or four times over the decades to make an iPad “work” and have never found anything to “do” with it that doesn’t quickly get subsumed by my phone (more easily available) or my laptop (better typing etc).
It always ends up playing videos or the kids playing some silly game.
> I think there’s just a kind of techie who desperately wishes they could do everything on an iPad
I think if the hardware differences really mattered Sidecar wouldn't exist, Mac wouldn't run iOS apps, iPhone wouldn't stream to Mac, and the AVP wouldn't stream/run apps from both platforms.
Would those devices be better if their software was strictly siloed from each other?
> Would those devices be better if their software was strictly siloed from each other?
Yes, yes they would. You would get software actually designed to fully exploit the capabilities of the device. And not, for example, shitty lazy port of mobile apps to MacOS
> You would get software actually designed to fully exploit the capabilities of the device.
Or you would just have a void where that hypothetical software could be, and this is what actually happened to the iPad (and AVP).
I totally agree. I had to choose and chose a macbook air. Love that little machine! Then, when I had saved up enough, I got myself the ipad (13") for reading ttrpg pdfs.
The two machines solve totally different problems. I never bothered to get the keyboard for the ipad - because typing is something i do on the macbook air. The ipad is incredible for reading pdfs that are meant to be letter/a4 sized.
>Touchscreens suck for text manipulation.
Indeed - and given LLM's have made the 'command line' great again and voice isn't appropriate in every scenario ( far too public ), hard to see how text input isn't critical.
The elephant in the room is something else.
iPhones need desktop mode. Your apps, your data. USB-C screen + Bluetooth keyboard/mouse. Running like iPadOS or even macOS.
Back in 2011, when Motorola released a phone that could do something similar, I was sure that was going to be the future. It’s been 15 years.
I still dream of the day when my computer lives on my wrist, and I just have a few dummy screens in different formats that can connect to it so I can consume media or be productive.
No thank you to no windowing on ipad, I like having one app up for references and another for my drawing program :)
I sign this essay. Apple has apparently multiple opposing goals for the iPadOS:
1. Make it powerful enough so that it can be sold as equivalent to macOS
2. Keep it locked like iOS, to be sold as secure alternative to computer for your parents and kids (which rules out all the workflow customization pros need)
3. Don’t make it powerful enough for people to stop buying Macs (Tim Cook’s biggest fear is of you not buying another slab of glass - no multiprofile for you, ever)
The intersection of these is an empty set.
I use my 2018 Pro as a great browser and YouTube machine, with zero intent to upgrade until the above situation changes. It’s useless for anything else, and even if I got M4 powerhouse, I wouldn’t be able to take it as a single machine for holiday for emergency Weathergraph hotfix or server debugging.
It’s got a bunch of decent ssh clients; I use mine quite often for this. With a hdmi capture thingy it’s also the display for a bunch of my rpis when they don’t boot etc..
Totally doable for travel debugging.
Yes, but what I meant was to have an IDE, where I could run and debug the stack, and deploy when happy.
Technically totally doable, just give me a VS Code + local Linux container (Apple Silicon is great at virtualization) to which it can tunnel.
In practice, impossible with Apple's limitations.
Buried in here is the very nice idea of an AI dividend for CLI users - as we keep designing interfaces for LLMs directly, those interfaces are text-oriented, and afford us a look at a future with the command line being central.
I like that. My recent tools are mostly AI first, and therefore CLI first. I’ve been toying with adding JSON modes to them, and this is undeniably useful, but I think I’ll keep JSON under flags; it’s a way to prioritize human users as well.
That is only because there is no viable platform to build similar gui-based tooling on
This makes me think of the interface for one handed touch screen typing that was used in the movie version of Ended’s game; it stuck with me as an example of a more touch friendly flexible input mechanism that really challenged how I thought about interfaces. Someone made an open source implementation of it but half the battle is getting these idioms to take root. I wish Apple would experiment more with novel touch interfaces in the way the article describes.
Am I the only person who likes the concept of "Sidebar" and using an iPad (often w/ an Apple Pencil) as a second display on a Mac?
Let me do that w/ a MacBook Neo and iPad Air pair which look as if they belong together and which fit nicely into a bag and afford me the option of taking only the iPad Air and Apple Pencil when I want to travel light, and maybe I'll come back to the fold (the last thing I bought from Apple was Mac OS X Public Beta, before that it was OpenSTEP 4.2, and the last thing Apple made which I truly liked wholeheartedly was Snow Leopard).
Oh yeah, make the Apple Pencil work on an iPhone....
Instead, these days, I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, Book 3 Pro 360 (two of them, panic-bought a spare when I though the line was being discontinued, it's now up to a Book 5), Kindle Scribe Colorsoft (replacing a first-gen unit) and a Wacom One display connected to a MacBook (purchased by an employer) and more Wacom styluses than I can easily count....
The high watermark of my graphical computing experience was using an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint w/ FutureWave SmartSketch when mobile, and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ --- I've tried pretty much every thing in-between since, but when things were finally getting better, Microsoft did Fall Creator's Update and everything came crashing down....
I'd really like for Apple to make a device trifecta which I would actually be willing to buy.
I think this touch-only idea would be more viable if we had far better haptic feedback from screens. All the fancy gestures and fluidic UI don't help when your only means of interaction is pushing against an unresponsive pane of glass. Maybe something better just isn't possible, but I'd love to see Apple push things forward in this area.
This article makes me very, very strongly want Bryce 3D for iPad.
Everything about using that app was about trying to make you feel like you could reach out and touch the screen. Now you can. Its user interface was nonsenical at the time. Now a spherical marble is sensible. Tap an object, then tap and hold; use other hand to operate the three-axis arrow control bar that swells up out of the interface into easy to touch controls. When you let go, they pop with a little spray of tri-color paint and a few speckles get left on the user interface.
Seriously, we have done almost nothing with what’s possible because everything is either Word, Letterpress, Tabletop Simulator, or cross-platform port. Meanwhile there’s an engine in there powerful enough to run Bryce with realtime rendering, but everyone wants to emulate a sheet of paper rather than letting me do the most basic things.
We could have painting with a pen and controlling z-depth with a hand at the same time. Path snap to collision avoidance margins on a slider. Negative margins and a setting to define collision handling: do you materials simulate two oils colliding at their spline velocity? Do they intersperse and blend like translucent colored sand? How far after the intersection does the aftertint continue in the brush stream?
Instead, we have, courtesy of AI, U-turned the industry all the way back to text adventure games with sentient potatoes.
Sigh.
Moment of Inspiration seems the most promising 3D modeling option --- done by the former lead developer of Rhinoceros 3D it's probably what I'm going to break down and buy if crash-and-burn on my current attempt to learn Alibre Atom 3D.
I just want a notebook the size and weight of a 10" ipad pro that I can run desktop software on. The Macbook Neo is 12" and weighs 1.23kg which is light but not "forget you have it in your bag" light.
It's frustating knowing that the ipad _could_ run mac os but won't due to intentional market segmentation by Apple.
It's definitely not ideal but the top model surface go 2 can be gotten for under $120 at this stage and will be somewhat usable for that with Linux installed
I imagine the surface go 4 with an n200 is probably a good bit better but several times the price; assuming it can run Linux
I was using an old (2nd or 3nd Gen) Surface Pro for several months doing this, and apart from it being Windows based (ugh) it was pretty good. Until I dropped the thing. o_O
I have a Surface Book now, that I put Linux on for a while (bad idea, super flaky with Surface Linux). I'd probably recommend the Surface Pro again over the Surface Book, and just put up with Windows (ugh x2). Using the AtlasOS variant at least, so less crappy compared to stock Windows.
The trouble is that would mean adding touch to macOS. Judging by what happened with Windows and Gnome I suspect that would be regressive.
They don’t even make the 10in pro anymore. The 11pro is 1lb but the keyboard case your inevitably also going to want is another 1.3lbs.. so you’re back at 1kg total, and worse than a MacBook neo for MacBook like uses.
> What does an LLM-first macOS look like?
Like a product I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.