‘100,000 Miles and One Week With an iPad Pro’

Matthew Panzarino, who went full-time on iPad Pro while traveling 18 months ago, reviewing the new iPad Pros for TechCrunch:

Lidar is a technology with a ton of promise and a slew of potential applications. Having this much more accurate way to bring the outside world into your device is going to open a lot of doors for Apple and developers over time, but my guess is that we’ll see those doors open over the next couple of years rather than all at once.

I think the lidar sensor in the new iPad Pro is sort of like the U1 ultra-wideband chip in the iPhones 11. It’s there for the future more than the present.

The whole review is excellent, with a slew of insightful observations, but I particularly like this bit regarding multitasking:

With iPad Pro, no matter where I have been or what I have been doing, I was able to flip it open, swipe up and be issuing my first directive within seconds. As fast as my industry moves and as wild as our business gets, that kind of surety is literally priceless.

Never once, however, did I wish that it was easier to use.

Do you wish that a hammer is easier? No, you learn to hold it correctly and swing it accurately. The iPad could use a bit more of that.

Currently, iPadOS is still too closely tethered to the sacred cow of simplicity. In a strange bout of irony, the efforts on behalf of the iPad software team to keep things simple (same icons, same grid, same app switching paradigms) and true to their original intent have instead caused a sort of complexity to creep into the arrangement.

★ Tuesday, 24 March 2020