Since the first iPad I have always liked the hardware format. Of course part of that is very likely to have been finally having a device in my hands that was like something out of Star Trek. It was the first Apple device I had ever bought for myself and it did not last long. While I did like the hardware and found that handing it to friends to show them something was just far more natural than handing them a laptop the device frustrated me. It was the first computer that I had used that was mostly closed to me and unlike the Linux computers I had been using for a long time I did not have the debugging tools I was used to. The best example of this was my early use of AirPlay. I had a few friends around and we were watching TED videos. We would select one and then pass the iPad to the next person to allow a fair selection of videos and then suddenly AirPlay to the Apple TV just stopped working. It was frustrating and yet amusing. There was nothing I could do to find out what the problem was. I rebooted the iPad, the Apple TV and even the WiFi access point but it changed nothing and for some unknown reason our TED watching was ended early that night.

That was nearly 10 years ago now and here I am a full Apple user. I have the Watch, the Phone, multiple Macs and iPads. It started when I was working with a team of developers back in 2013 that were all using MacBook Pros and they needed help from me to run their local environments. At that point I could continue on using a Linux device and still support them or I could make my life easy, get a MacBook Pro and be working on the same environment as them. Shortly after that my Android device spilled my contacts into LinkedIn without my permission, that day I went and bought an iPhone and I have never looked back.

The point of this is now however where I am today. Slowly over the past few years I have been moving to doing more and more of my work on iPad. The reason for this is simple. For anything there is an iPad app for it just works. It started with drawing architectural diagrams, the simple lines and boxes stuff that digital architects do to provide overall views of complex systems. That was the first iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil. It just made something which had been hard to do on a computer very easy. Next was the video calls as I started doing more remote working. I started to find that the iPhone and iPad apps for things like WebEx, Slack and later Teams were far more stable than the desktop versions. I did not experience the call drop outs or bad connections that others did. I never hit the problems of the mic not working, things just worked. I now have an iPad hooked up to a monitor at my desk and my bluetooth keyboard has a hotkey for switching to it. I do all of my ChatOps via the iPad, most of my email and a few other things like notes.

Sadly there is one side of my work I have not yet managed to migrate and that is development. There are code writing apps for iPadOS but something is always sticky and hard to use with them. Either they don’t have git integration and rely on another app to handle git or if they do it is terrible and doesn’t work. There is no good syntax highlighting or amazing editors with plugins. I think maybe with WebIDEs like GitLab and others have we might all get there one day but right now there is nothing close to VIM/VSCode/JetBrains that works for me and yet I do want something like this. I want to come to a device to do my work that just works, every time and I don’t have to worry about any sort of administration. As easy as macOS is that still isn’t true. I have to concern myself with Homebrew, updates and other issues none of which are an issue on iPadOS.

I say this of course, that’s not what I want the rest of the time. I am not typing this on an iPadOS or even macOS device. Sometimes I want to get more low level and have more access and control over the system I am using but when I am doing the day job that is not the requirement and I am looking forward to the day I can ditch the macOS device fully for an iPadOS thing.

Peace, love and happiness.