Alright, I’ll admit it, I’m Apple Cucked.
I bought an 11-inch M2 Apple iPad Air last week, and I believe it was a solid decision. This is the first Apple product I have purchased from an Apple store, new in box, for full retail price.
I’ve been semi-interested in an iPad for years. I can trace back as far as 2018, when the iPads were going on sale at Target. At that point, they were like 300 bucks and were barely scratching the surface of being remotely close to a laptop. This model, on the other hand, ran me around half a grand, after my education discount (that they never verified, somehow). I also got the Apple Pencil Pro. My initial draw was I want to get better at doing art. I don’t find myself to be a good artist at all. I’ve done art for years, I’ve done little silly sketches trying to experiment with my own style and trying to nail something but I just never really feel satisfied with anything I do. Ergo, I’ve actually discovered that there’s objectives with art, and I’m rarely ever hitting them. So my new iPad will be a tool for me to practice my art skills over time.
I have been using it every single day. I have a lot of things I like about it, and a lot that I do not. Here’s my review so far.
Pros:
I like the Apple Pencil Pro a lot. It’s probably the most responsive drawing tablet situation I’ve ever used. I hate, hate, hate, cannot stand, the disconnect between a drawing tablet and not seeing what I’m doing in front of me, so I found that being able to directly interface with the screen is exceptionally invaluable. That said, I think that as someone who is not a pro user, I did not necessarily need the Pro Apple Pencil. There’s features in the Pencil Pro that I just simply don’t use. I don’t ever squeeze the pencil to bring up menus in apps, and I don’t even think the apps I use for art (PhotoShop) support the Pencil Pro at all to begin with, so I just simply disabled it, as the haptic feeling of squeezing the pencil kept bugging me. I wish that Apple engineered some sort of smart eraser functionality so you can just flip the pencil around and have an eraser right there, as that feels natural and innovative to me on other styluses, but is absent from this one. I would have gone for the cheaper model, I think, in hindsight, but the price point was so close that I guess it doesn’t really matter.
I like the iOS a lot. I feel right at home given my main device phone is an iPhone, so everything kinda just fell into place for me.
I got the Logitech Combo Touch which I opted to purchase because it was cheaper than the Apple Magic Keyboard by like $100 and also the fact that it allows you to disconnect the keyboard from the device. I needed a case because I felt like I was just going to bump and scratch the thing around, so that solved two issues for me. The device is fully covered, and the keyboard can come off. I like that functionality a lot.
I constantly get surprised by the USB-C functionality. Coming from only ever using Apple devices that supported Lightning, it’s awesome that I can plug in a USB hub and a USB mouse and just, use it. Ethernet works as expected. SD readers work as expected. Everything just works. Apple switching to USB-C on their mobile devices was an awesome decision.
The thing is blazingly fast. I have no speed complaints. Apple’s M line processors are very alluring. I will expect this device to work well for a good 6-8 years.
Cons:
I don’t like the iOS a lot, also. The operating system is quite limiting, and there is an obvious disconnect between Mac OSX and iOS, yet the device is still in the form factor of something that runs their desktop OS. So I’m using the thing and trying to open up dozens of Firefox tabs to do some research at work and everything just feels weird. I would prefer just the desktop layout of Firefox. I also understand that by running the iOS version of Firefox, it’s truly just Safari with a Mozilla coat of paint. Soooo lame. I can’t run extensions on here, ad blockers, nothing, and the worst part is Firefox for iPad DOES load the desktop versions of sites, it’s just so frustrating. I tried a few DNS ad blockers to try and evade this issue but it only gets like 50-60% of the ads. My options are switch to Safari or deal with ads, which is slightly against my moral code. Still trying to figure this out.
I find a lot of mobile versions of apps, which do run on the iPad, are their iPhone layouts, and therefore show up as a tiny little iPhone sized display in the center of the screen. Hate that, but I prefer web versions most of the time anyway, save for the ads.
I find transferring content between iOS and PC to be a little annoying. Probably easier on a Mac…
On the whole, I’ve been enjoying and using the iPad every day, and if anything, it’s sucking me back into the Apple ecosystem. I don’t want to admit it, but I’m seriously considering a Mac. This is how they get you. We’ll see how Windows 11 fares moving forward.
