When is keeping people illiterate a good thing? Every kid is going to need to use computers throughout their entire lives. and they need to take typing in school, so they do not have to peck their entire lives.
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iPad Pro iPad Pro M4 vs. Microsoft's New Surface Pro 11: Sound Off!
- Thread starter Kahnforever
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Uh, I don't think he was saying anything even remotely like what you posted LOL
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You are correct, I have some experience in this area. The nice thing about using a Chromebook is the are relatively cheap. and the school has complete control of their use. person starting out with their first experience with a computer in a school setting would have a hard time getting in too much trouble with one. They also are not very valuable on the street. At home under close supervision I can think of nothing better than a Macbook Air, combined with a Google Home assistant. The Google home Assistant is the best database device I know of. It can upper level math but you have to know how to phrase the question, and important learning tool. Geography, Hey Google where is (Camp) "Chicken*?" it is a real time saver. I used to get in trouble with fellow teachers when I taught my students how to use the footnotes and indexes in text books. I told them in college you will not have the time for much of the Bovine Scatology teacher here are making you do. The teachers would whine I wanted them to read the chapter. I told them you are looking at a Archivist, My philosophy of teaching, teachers are alway gassing away with this. What is mine, "It is better to know where to look it up than to know it". Talk about heart palpitations.
* it was named Chicken because no one knew how to spell Ptarmigan. 😃
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Whelp, it's been a few weeks, I've given it a thorough shake. I'm surprised by how many things I missed from the iPad, honestly. I was so focused on having a real shell on a tablet, and it's been so long since I've tried to use windows for more than just gaming, that I never considered how far behind it was for a Prosumer device. These things don't affect business users for sure, but for someone like me that works from home... here's a non-comprehensive list of things I really miss:
- Home automation control. While not a primary function, it sure is nice to turn on a fan or close a blind (yes my home is rigged) without taking a phone out of my pocket while working. MS has nothing for this. I ended up using the Homeassistant PWA web app which takes me to number 2...
- Native apps. Almost everything I'm using on windows is a PWA or Electron app. WTF happened to Windows? Are games he last native things being built for Windows? Even my spiffy new Copilot button... SUMMONS a web app! Lol. I may as well run Chrome OS at this point. Chrome OS has a real shell too. They abandoned their voice assistant? I can't ask it to set a timer, a reminder, turn off a light, anything... by contrast, most things on iPad are native. There's built in stuff for all these things.
- The ability to cast things. Audio, Video... I can cast so easily on iPad. With windows I had to learn about Miracast, and then learn that nothing I own supports it (not my Sony TVs, not my Samsung TVs, not my LG TVs... nothing except a stray Roku TV in a guest bedroom). The software on Windows that allows you to airplay doesn't support ARM yet. And Miracast seems to have nothing to do with music casting, only screen casting. I looked into all sorts of ways to bridge this and it was all hateful. Meanwhile, I have a chrome os device that can cast to anything easily (native support in every TV) and of course my Apple stuff can. This seems to be a WI does problem.
- Ability to use it on my lap. I expected it to be subpar, but it's horrible. Simply doesn't work. iPad works great on a lap with its keyboard case.
- An on-screen keyboard that doesn't suck. I didn't realize how good iPad's on screen keyboard was until I used Windows. It's janky, opens when you don't want it to, doesn't open when you do want it to, and just performs poorly.
- Mobile gaming. I don't do a ton of it, but sometimes I'll pass the time. Any sort of gaming on the surface destroys the battery. I can play a 20 min game on iPad at the cost of maybe 3% battery, and go back to work.
- A rich app ecosystem. I remember when Windows had all the apps. How times change. I had a really hard time finding good apps for things. I ended up mostly using PWAs. At least Concepts had a windows port.
- Availability. The iPad just always feels available. Touch the screen and it's on. With surface you gotta hit a button if it's been dormant for more than a few minutes. Then there's software updates and reboots and etc. These things are so rare on iPad, common on Surface.
With all that said... here's the things I liked about the Surface:
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- The pen. The haptic feedback was great, and it performed wonderfully. I loved the eraser on the top. In general, I liked writing on the Surface better than on the iPad. I don't hate it on the iPad but it's Better on surface.
- Local real terminal and VS Code. This was the whole reason I bought it, and it was great.
- The kickstand. While also a bane when used on lap, it had a lot of great uses In tablet mode. I wish iPad had a kickstand that could be used when not in the keyboard case.
What am I doing now?
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I bought a top-of-the-line M4 iPad Pro and I've returned the Surface
Thankfully Microsoft (ironically) provides an acceptable iPad development environment through GitHub codespaces. It requires internet but it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make for all the other things Surface misses on.
It was mostly because of the misses above, but also their handling of the new "AI" features Surface was supposed to ship with, then ripped out... Recall was something I was interested in but the whole thing reminded me of how terrible Microsoft is at privacy & security.
The whole experiment was worth while. It's easy to focus on the iPad's shortcomings. But I appreciate what it does well a lot more after a few weeks on Surface. Dealing with its flaws remains easier than dealing with the competitions flaws... at least for me.