I thought it’d be fun to share some details of my transition to the iPad Air 2022 as my everyday personal computer. This is my third iPad, and previously I had an iPad Air 2 from 2015.
I’ll update this with other points as I get them.
I’ll update this with other points as I get them.
- Touch ID/power. So, I have to touch the power button to authorise using my iPad. But if I then PRESS that button… The iPad turns off. This is insane. Who thought that was a good idea? Effectively, to unlock and start using the iPad, I have to (a) touch the power button and then (b) swipe up on the screen. Why have they made a basic action we do 100x every day into a two-step procedure? Who signed that off?
- [Edit: See trick below–it’s not ideal but it’s better]
- Battery life.The iPad Air 2 just lasted essentially forever between charges. The iPad Air 2022 is much more like a laptop. It’s mid-afternoon now and I’m at 54% from a 100% charge this morning. And I haven’t been using it all day. Maybe 2-3 hours in total. Charging time for the iPad 2022 isn’t fast either using the supplied charger+USB C cable – I haven’t timed it but it must be 4-5 hours for a full charge, at least. I expected iPhone-like charging times.
- [Edit: Battery drain is partially because I’m using a Logi Combo case. The same happens with the official Apple Magic Keyboard, apparently. This sucks. But I do believe the battery drain on the new iPad Air 2022 is more rapid than my old iPad Air 2, probably because it‘s simply got a more powerful processor. I do use the iPad intensively, but I’m getting around six hours at the moment until I’m down to a very low charge.]
- iPadOS: Holy moly, iPadOS is buggy. Example: Just now I was pasting in an email address, and for some reason it kept cutting off parts of the end of the address when I hit enter. The solution was to type a comma after the address. At the moment I’m encountering maybe 1-2 usability bugs every day. It reminds me a lot of trying to use Linux back in the day, except at least with Linux you could try and fix things yourself.
- iPad apps. I guess I’d never really used iPad apps for things like Amazon and eBay but, wow, they’re not great quality. They work. But they look shoddy. Buttons stretched across the entire width of the screen, for example, because somebody hasn’t properly optimised for the iPad display. The Amazon app right now has a nasty bug that means pointer control doesn’t work for the bottom navbar. LinkedIn is another offender, and even the supposedly good Apollo app for Reddit just looks like a stretched iPhone with a really poor quality layout on the iPad screen. I think it’s probably better just to use the websites, as I would on a laptop.
- Performance. Just great. I mean, this is what I’d be expecting from a MacBook except there’s not even the potential for pinwheeling. Notably, although people have rightly been pointing out the 8GB of RAM in the new iPad Air 2022, it’s actually 7.45GB when the screen memory is deducted. No big deal, I guess, but worth knowing.
- Camera. Still got the oil-painting effect if you zoom in, just like the iPhone 13! I guess this is now to be found wherever Apple’s machine learning tech is in use. Shame. But I won’t be using the camera much, if at all.
- Multitasking/PIP. Still getting used to multitasking. I’ve been playing around with slide over, which arguably seems the most useful. You can turn a website into a mobile phone viewport, for example. It’s disappointing that picture-in-picture isn’t supported in the Files app—it means you have to buy an app if you want to play MP4s picture-in-picture from a NAS. PIP is also a big buggy in that sometimes the video window gets stuck in the middle of the screen, rather than reverting to a corner. This appears to be related to the assumption the hardware keyboard is on-screen.
- Edit: I finally found a decent PIP media player that’s free, in the form of Infuse.]
- Trackpad/pointer: Got to remember that this has been retrofitted to iOS, essentially, and remains a minority sport for enthusiasts. It crashes (e.g. pointer disappears and can only be fixed be restart the iPad). There are bugs. There are stupid usability issues. For example, some apps register the pinch/expand gesture on the trackpad as selection/clicking on something (e.g. the App Store). So, the app will often accidentally register the two-finger scroll gesture as clicking/selecting something, which is astonishingly frustrating.
- Right-clicking: There’s an option in Settings to turn this on but apart from Safari, it’s not a thing within apps. And what’s replaced it is a PITA because sometimes you have to click and hold to get the context menu, while other times you have to swipe left or right to get these options. Sometimes none of this works and although a context menu will appear if you’re tapping on the screen with fingers, there doesn’t appear to be a way to make it work for pointer/trackpad use.
- Keyboard. Often text entry just doesn’t work 100% logically. A couple of things have caught me out so far. One was typing in the text field within an app. I switched to a different app, and when I switched back, the app assumed I’d given up typing so had cleared the field. Similarly, if I’m typing in text fields then the app isn’t always clever enough to scroll automatically to show the cursor and what I’m typing. Sometimes I end up typing “below the line” of the text field, so have to manually scroll it. This is no-doubt because an on-screen keyboard is assumed. No selecting and then dragging to move text either. There’s a handful of capitalisation issues too—if I click to start tying within an existing sentence, the iPad will assume I want a capital letter. Basically, text entry from a keyboard is just not as mature as it is on a Mac. Hopefully this will be fixed in future updates of iPadOS
- Short USB C lead. Why? It’s almost useless if you’re plugged into the wall. I’m relatively new to the world of USB C so don’t have any spare leads I can swap-in. I’ll have to buy one. I’d like a stand but not many of those work with cases in my experience.
- [Edit: Getting the right replacement lead is tricky because the usual USB A 15 watt/3 amp cables aren’t going to charge as quickly as they might. The only option is USB C to USB C — see my notes below about USB C voltages and chargers.]
- Screen. This might be the first Apple hardware I’ve ever had (since 2003!) for which I haven’t got issues with the screen. Out of the box it’s been great. Say what you like about OLED vs Mini LED vs IPS LCD, but IPS LCD is very mature. With this iPad, there’s no weird tints on white backgrounds. There’s no inconsistent backlighting. I do have to turn the brightness up quite a bit when watching movies full screen, especially if there are dark scenes, but this is how it is on all Apple hardware and has something to do with how they manage the gamma on video playback.
- Size: I wish it was an inch bigger. It seems Apple’s taken the decision to make all their range either compact or large/pro. Most of us want medium.
- Websites: Nobody mentions this but the iPad Air 2022’s effective resolution is a notch smaller than most desktop websites expect (I’m talking about the 2x pixel-doubling viewport resolution, not native retina). This means the sites use responsive design to chop off some features. A good example is the YouTube website, where the date alongside the view count is chopped off. On The Guardian website, you only see a truncated weather box. You’d an get around this by zooming out (Cmd+minus on a keyboard) but this zooms out to 85% — a bit too much. I hope Apple fixes this and lets us zoom out perhaps in 5% increments.
- [Edit: Definitely turn off True Tone. I wish there was a way to adjust True Tone so it is more subtle. For example, right now if switched on (morning in my living room with natural lighting) it wants to turn the white web page yellow. This is just too much. About 50% of that would be pretty good.
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