I have a MacBook from work so I do compare them. It’s a worse user experience. No touchscreen, screen is lower and further from my eyes. It’s physically less pleasant to use. There are also some use-cases I can’t even do with the MacBook form factor - eg. on planes, I mount the iPad on the seat in front of me so I watch movies at eye level. Sometimes I hold the iPad in my hands when in pure reading consumption mode.
>I have a MacBook from work so I do compare them. It’s a worse user experience. No touchscreen
And that matters for coding work because?
>screen is lower and further from my eyes.
The iPad screen doesn't have any fixed position, so what are you comparing it to? iPad propped on an Apple iPad keyboard (which would be even lower)? iPad handheld which would be unusable? iPad set flat on a table? iPad on a stand (if so, what prevents you putting the MacBook on a stand?)
MacBook works great at work! Based on my experience with my work device, it’s as pleasant for casual media consumption.
The Magic Keyboard actually lifts the iPad above the keyboard, which puts it in a better viewing position in laptop-mode than an actual laptop. Every little bit helps when you have creaky tendons and joints.
I'm curious what makes you think the MBA is a more "full experience?"
The MBA is permanently affixed to its keyboard: so it can't easily be used for consumption (in bed, on the couch, etc.) The MBA also has no touch screen, and no stylus. The iPad can also ship with a built-in cellular radio. Now I'm carrying an extra tablet, plus an extra hotspot.
That sure sounds like a lot of compromises to me. If I needed more performance I'd be stepping up to a MBP for the active cooling, which pushes us into a different price bracket anyways. If I needed more disk/memory bandwidth I wouldn't even be considering a portable in the first place. (More realistically: I would be using my portable to shell into a more powerful box, and an iPad Pro or even an iPad Air would do that just as well as any MacBook.)
If you need more external I/O, well, I'm not sure I buy that the iPad Pro is a serious compromise over the MBA. It has 40Gb/s of bandwidth and that's _a lot_ for the vast majority of use-cases. My main MBP already sits docked all day via a single thunderbolt cable.
The only reason I would actually choose an MBA over an iPad is that I'm a developer. I place strangely disproportionate value on things like an untrusted boot-chain, kernel extensions, and freedom.[1] I like having the flexibility to be able to bless and enroll my own bootable volumes. I want to be able to tinker with the system partition. I want to introspect the system when things go wrong. The iPad challenges these things by design.
I cannot emphasize this enough: _all of my friends would be lost trying to follow along with the preceding paragraph._ They would look at me like I had two heads. _The above desiderata are not at all representative of the average computer user today._ For most of what I do (media consumption and some content creation) the iPad Pro would do an excellent job, I'd argue better than the MBA. For everything else I do: "iPad Pro vs. MBA" is a false dichotomy, I would not be choosing either of those machines. I would buy a workstation-class device at a minimum.
>I'm curious what makes you think the MBA is a more "full experience?"
The MBA is permanently affixed to its keyboard: so it can't easily be used for consumption (in bed, on the couch, etc.)
News to me, as it never prevented me from doing exactly that. Like hundreds of millions who don't own a tablet (and I do own some).
Oh man, these looked so awesome. I miss these phones sometimes. There was something cool about seeing what features different phones had. Nowadays, it's basically iOS vs Android, where both OSes do pretty much the same things, and it's all about the apps.
Sony had these on their Clié (Palm OS) devices as well.
I’ve only ever had first-party Palm handhelds, but the scroll wheel (Sony had some nifty name which is eluding me) always seemed very appealing for single-handed use.
I had a SonyEricsson P800 (the first of that series) and it had the same wheel, but IIRC was plastic made (just like the rest of the phone). Oh man I was barely 20yo back then and I feel bad for the hype I had while waiting the phone to actually come out and buy it. I also remember I paid an insane amount of money for it, which then became standard a few years later thanks to Apple.
I thought this too initially, however by now I would expect one of those to 'break rank' and actually demonstrate some impressive use case, I've not seen anything in terms of 'fire and forget' agents actually achieving a task of any complexity. I had some success using AutoGPT to do some web scraping and it's ability to use powershell was impressive and powerful, and with no safeguarding somewhat hazardous, however it's unpredictability was intolerable.
