Why Is the Split Keyboard Not Available on iPad Pros?

I really like my new 11-inch iPad Pro. I’m using it more than I’ve used an iPad in a long time, especially for reading. It’s my favorite device for reading ever, and I read a lot. But it has been driving me nuts that it doesn’t support a split on-screen keyboard.

I tweeted about this a few weeks ago and a few people replied with the answer that the new iPad Pros have a different on-screen keyboard than the non-Pro iPads, one that more closely resembles the key layout of a hardware keyboard. It’s true that the keyboard is different, but that doesn’t explain why you can’t split it. Why not allow it to be split and revert to the same split keyboard as on non-Pro iPads? What makes this more baffling is that the bigger the iPad is, the more likely it is that you need a split keyboard — and the iPad Pros are the biggest iPads Apple has made. I want to type with my thumbs, iPhone-style, and can’t, because my iPad is too big. And I have relatively large hands and I’m using the 11-inch iPad Pro, not the 13-inch one. I’m not even sure Craig “Fleshy Palms” Hockenberry could thumb-type on a 13-inch iPad Pro.

The bottom line is that because I want to thumb-type, I type better on-screen with my iPhone than I do my iPad, and I can type better on an old iPad than my new one that cost $1,000. This is just baffling to me — so much so that until I found Apple’s support document confirming that the split keyboard is not available on 11-inch or bigger iPad Pros that I thought maybe the problem was me not knowing how to turn it on.

★ Tuesday, 18 December 2018