Is this thing still on?
It has been quite a while since I posted here. My lack of posts has not been due to an ending of the iPad Experiment. It has continued and become my normal.
In some ways, this normalcy could be seen as the mark of the end of part one of the experiment.
Part Two began with the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Much of the world was asked to rethink and re-examine their relationship with technology. What was once considered perfectly adequate (e.g., the cameras that came with their laptops and desktops ) shifted into entirely inadequate almost overnight.
The iPad fared relatively well. It was not perfect by anyone's stretch of the imagination but when you were overhearing the struggles of a teacher trying to adjust their teaching to fit within the confines of a Chromebook chosen a few years before based on its price rather than its performance, it looked great in
Now, however, the iPad line exists alongside devices that were redesigned with the lessons learned from the pandemic. And some of the limitation-based strengths of the iPad have begun to feel like weaknesses.
One of the things that enabled me to navigate the non-stop meetings of the pandemic (I was serving as an interim dean at the time.) was having access to an iPad Mini. This allowed me to have Zoom running on my iPad Pro's screen while I took notes or referenced documents on the smaller screen.
The need to do this was due to a strength of the iPad -- that it is primarily a unitasking environment. It demands a kind of focus that laptops and desktops seem to actively discourage in their users.
I have been thinking about that a lot of late.
One reason I have been thinking about this is driven by conversations in the tech media -- especially in some of the blogs and podcasts of some of the iPad's greatest champions. Wether it is the time in the wilderness that Federico Viticci felt compelled to take following his struggles with Stage Manager or Jason Snell's realization that the new M-series Macs were his better choice for one device travel, users have started to critically examine the iPad and ask the kind of questions of it that were asked of laptops during the pandemic.
These questions all boil down to a very fair, very simple question: Is living with the collection of pain points that come with this device a good trade off for me?
For tech journalists who increasingly must engage in audio and video production, it is easy to see why the answer might be no. That there are not the kind of advanced tools (hardware and software) that they need to do their job is an understandable dealbreaker. And if, in their frustration, they sometimes state their case in a way that conflates the very specific issues they face with a larger problem with the platform, who can blame them? The issues, after all, do clearly highlight the kind of limitations their readers and listeners should know about.
That said, there are more people in the world who take notes than there are who make podcasts. And the fact that I am writing this post (at least its initial draft) on my iPad Mini in Apple Notes using an Apple Pencil via the Scribble feature tells me that there are stories about the iPad line that are still not being told.
One of them requires us to reexamine our attachment to keyboards.
The other reason I have been thinking about the limits that the iPad has been bumping into has to do with my own list of "but why doesn't Apple just... " thoughts. These are exactly the same kind of things I was referring to above. For tech journalists, the question is why can't Apple allow the M-series iPads to do more with recording multiple audio streams.
My need/want probably involves asking Apple to break some of the laws of physics.
I want an iPad Mini Pro.
Specifically, I want an iPad Mini that can drive an external monitor using Stage Manager, as it functions in The iPadOS 17 betas.*
I want the iPad Mini to be my primary device — one that makes it easier to switch from a keyboard mindset to one that places the Apple Pencil in my hand and think more about what I am writing and, perhaps, makes me consider dictation more often.
This is especially true for those times when I know that giving myself the time to think about the words going down on the digital page is an improvement over the false efficiency of typing.
While I don't know if this could be done, I do know there would be a host of trade offs. The Mini would have to be plugged in while it drove the monitor because the battery would be insufficient for all day usage. The weird rotational issues that crop up with Zoom when being projected to an external monitor would be less ideally solved by keeping that app on the smaller screen. There is even less room to move the camera to a landscape edge (although iPadOS 17 may solve that via external camera support).
And I would need a long list of potentially expensive peripherals to really make such a set-up work.
*Given the battery size of the Mini, this would almost certainly require it to be plugged in. Yes, the battery could be made a little bigger but that path towards a solution eventually leads you to using an iPad Air or Pro, defeating the purpose of the Mini.