Is my iPad a real computer now?

Notes on the current state of the world’s most advanced mobile OS.

iOS 8 is great, as will everyone who upgraded tell you. It has empowered my devices in many ways, which now work together like never before. Read that last sentence in Tim Cook’s voice and add “It’s really amazing” at the end. I’m not going to list what’s great about it because everything has been written. One aspect I want to highlight concerns how this 8th iOS iteration is taking the hardware to a whole new level, almost a futuristic one; continuity/handoff’s importance, for example, cannot be overstated. It’s the beginning of a new era for hardware, capable to interact and work seamlessly in ways we couldn’t even imagine (outside of sci-fi movies). This is something that only a design-focused company like Apple — with control on both hardware and software and a massive user base already familiar with its ecosystem — could manage to do with such elegance.

There’s always something else to do to improve these devices and their operating systems, of course. A handful of things comes to my mind, especially looking at my iPad Air. This is a device that has gone a long way now, a new kind of personal computer that neverthless still doesn’t feel to me like a fully-fledged computer. As a longtime iOS user who can’t help but imagine what his devices can be, without failing to appreciate what they are, I’ve gathered some thoughts on iOS. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. When I play a video, literally everything makes it stop. Control Center, answering a message, writing a note, tweeting a tweet. This make me feel like I’m using a phone, and it sucks. I want to watch things without having to stop everything else.
2. A little thing I’m used to do on my Mac is painful on my iPad: opening links in Safari in background, from other apps. When scrolling my Twitter timeline in particular, I like to open many tabs to check out later. On iOS, I need to continuously move back and forth between Safari and Tweetbot, or other apps. It drives me nuts.
3. iCloud Drive app. That would end once and for all any type of confusion regarding “what is where” on iOS. iCloud Drive itself is huge, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not an excuse to go further with this new approach.
4. Better text selection and pointing. I’m not a designer, I don’t have a solution for this, but it’s something that makes me feel like I’m not using a “real” computer. Copying and pasting sections of text right now is just painful, you know that. Come on, you’re full of talented people, come up with something smart and easy and Appleish.
5. File/resolution handling in Photos app. Something easy and unobtrusive maybe, but I often need to know if a picture is compressed or not, if it’s a png or jpeg, which resolution and so on. I’d also like to be able to compress an image or set a specific resolution, for example before uploading it or sharing it with other apps. These are files, but iOS doesn’t seem to want to treat them as such. The bugs in Safari make the situation even worse.

A sidenote on point 2 (the opening links in background from other apps point). I had this weird idea of making Safari work like the Notification Center, something you can “pull” whenever you need it. Yes, Safari is an app, but Internet navigation on tablets and smartphone is ubiquitous and lots of activities require a browser window to be open (like writing blog posts, writing blog posts and writing blog posts). In some apps, like Editorial, the internal browser already works this way, so I can’t help but imagine if it were a system-wide feature. Of course the ability to snap apps next to each other would solve this, at least on iPad.

Before wrapping things up, I want to defeat my cognitive biases and make a couple of (opposite) observations. The iPad has been around for a while now, then it’s dangerously easy to forget a couple of things. First, that paper-thin, gorgeous piece of technology is a COMPUTER, and we should still be amazed by that; second, you can’t easily plug external storage devices to your iPad because Apple wants to make you pay unreasonable amounts of money to have more internal storage. We take this for granted now, but it’s still an insult to consumers.

That’s mostly it, these are my thoughts; I could have probably gone further but I wanted to keep this short and reasonable. As an aside: I have actually written and edited part of this article on my iPad, since you can edit Medium drafts on iOS with that lovely Request Desktop Site button. Moreover, I have dictated some paragraphs as well — I must say that Siri, and in general dictation, finally works smoothly and in real time. Amen to that.

Say hi on Twitter, I’m @linuz90.

The post has been edited after publication, because it included this point: “Please Apple provide a decent way to undo and redo. I still have to shake my iPad to do that. It’s acceptable on an iPhone, but on an iPad? Seriously?” Of course it’s my fault, I didn’t ever notice the “Undo” button on the iPad virtual keyboard. It’s not very efficient but it’s something. Thanks Jan.