Back to the Mac
I loved reading Matt Gemmel’s story of going from the iPad back to the Mac. A few highlights.
A year or two ago, I started to get very into e-ink tablets, and I’ve now wholly settled on the Supernote platform. I love these digital notebooks, and while I wasn’t conscious of it at first, they immediately replaced all my usage of the Apple Pencil...
My setup currently is a 14” M1 Max MacBook Pro alongside an iPad Mini 6th generation. The iPad is for all my freeform design sketching and the Mac is for everything else. I tried an iPad only like Matt, but stuck to it for a few months rather than years. It just couldn’t work for all the things I wanted.
What I’m curious about though, is the Supernote (or Remarkable or similar) platforms. I need to think and work with a pen like tool and paper like tool beside me. If I couldn’t have an iPad I’d be using pen and paper. But I love the digital aspect of a large canvas, the ability to erase and re-write, add color, rotate, copy and paste, etc. Those things are so valuable as a sort of digital whiteboard.
Freeform though, despite how much I love it, isn’t perfect. It’s got some problems. Past a certain point it starts to freeze up and can’t handle my files. I have to baby it a bit to keep it behaving the way I want. I’ve long been interested in whether an e-ink tablet could essentially do the same thing. I don’t need to scribble with instant results, I often draw slow lines to convey ideas. E-ink is just fine for this.
I haven’t decided to invest the money though to see if it could really work. My iPad is on the outs though and I’ll likely upgrade this year. Now I’m wondering if I invest that $600 or so into a new iPad or try an e-ink device.
… my wife realised that she could do with a second monitor to use with her work MacBook Pro in her home office, and duly bought a 4K 27-inch Dell model, which I VESA-mounted to her desk. Every time I would walk past her office or go in, which was daily, I’d admire the thing.
I’ve been laptop only for about three years, eschewing any monitor. It’s funny to hear Matt’s story of wrestling with whether he wants an external monitor. I know I want one, I just don’t want to settle for anything except 5k resolution.
The entries in the Files app from files providers will mysteriously stop working and need to be re-created, which takes less than a minute, but is still a hassle.
The exact moment I broke with regard to iPad, and decided to never trust it again as my single device for work, was when I desperately needed to get a modified PDF off to my banker for a real estate transaction. I wrestled for over an hour with the stupid thing, trying to move a document between email and Files, annotate it, and then upload it to the right server, a task that would have taken me seconds on the Mac.
Am I delighted to be back on macOS? God no. What a sad thing to be delighted about. Am I glad to be rid of the iPad? Also no; I’m keeping the iPad, albeit now in search of a role, and I dearly love the device and the platform.
The tools we use to create the things we care about often require living in and around an operating system to just function. Because of how much time I spend in front of screens I’ve chosen to go Apple all the way. I stepped away from Windows in 2010 and haven’t regretted it one moment. I love that Matt’s wrestled with iPad and Mac, seeing positives and negatives and both, and ultimately wanting the right tool for the work that he wants to do.
Stories like this are why I love diving into geeky things and caring about all the minute details.
Via Matt Gemmel.