Ah yes, the iPad, an innovation that the great Tim Cook unveiled himself in one of Apple’s many many WWDCs. In recent years, it has been referred to as a productivity device, a tool through which real work can be made. Yet, as a owner of this magnificent product, there has scarcely been pleasure using this device in any productive setting, from my personal experience. In exchange, much time was spent understanding a system that was not designed for productivity from the very beginning.
Disclaimer: Everything I am about to say is mostly a rant, entirely my personal opinion and may not represent the whole truth.
I’ll get to the point. Probably not everybody that owns an iPad, also has an iCloud subscription. This is reasonable. After all, it is a relatively expensive service to pay for, and binds you further into the Apple Ecosystem. Yet, in their delicately constructed Walled Garden, Apple refuses to make room for alternatives, open-source (hey he said the funny word!!) projects that may at some point threaten the existence of iCloud. Like Syncthing, a continuous file synchronisation program that can connect virtually any number of devices into a personal network. As you may be able to tell, this is a fairly major part of Apple Inc.’s offerings. But while there are freely available clients on Linux, Windows, possibly MacOS through brew and on Android, there is no free equivalent for the iPad.
What’s the problem with this? Well, the transiency of the mind’s working hinders, to a degree, any eventual recollection. In essence, It is harder to remember archiving something, than to write your thoughts down at this instant. For such occasions, continuous synchronisation is a true helping hand. But opting not to pay for extortionate online services when I have one that’s set up perfectly fine at home should also be an accepted moral.
Then there comes the issue of communication between outside and within the Walled Garden, and in this case I’d argue it’s not just Apple’s fault, but mostly Google’s. Preferring to use Google Drive (someday I shall set up my own…), I found it extremely counter-intuitive. The Drive app evidently supported uploading multiple files, and entire folders (really not expecting recursive sub-directory traversal here…). But tapping on the folder in the Files app simply brought me into it, without giving an option to share this particular folder.
Of course, I could just be dumb, just like how I realised you had to go into a sub-menu in Safari and scroll down to find a button that saves a PDF from the web into your iPad’s drive. But had Apple or Google ever taken this workflow into consideration, or it’s just that no one has ever complained? Evidently not the latter, since a gentle cruise on the Google Support forums show many questions relating to the same issue, while met with the same answers from other users - “I Don’t Know”, “They have disabled it”, or in more extreme cases, offensive words thrown towards the corporation that shan’t be uttered here. The issue I take up with is not just with the product design, but also the level of support and consideration given towards the end user. This mustn’t be an uncommon use case, yet it is “janky” to the point that I wrote all these words to complain about it. If you are a professional working with the processing of a large number of PDFs or other files, and you don’t have an easy way to locally transfer them to another medium (another point which deserves a future rant about…), you probably will suffer from painstakingly uploading each single file.
And that’s exactly it, the productivity of an Apple Tablet, what successful businessmen refer to as the future of paperless work, where uploading more than one PDF to a remote location requires delicate and detailed analysis, requiring the conjuring up of increasingly convoluted means; where you must click the “Share” icon to save a file; where only the UI shell matters, and nothing else. If I diagnose 50% of Apple Fanboys of Stockholm Syndrome, I’d be missing another half. Being at first enthralled by the note-taking potential of it, I resolve to never use an Apple-made device ever again, no matter how much advertising the corporation shoves in my face, how much Apple Intelligence it’s fitted with, and whether it’s equipped with the M69 or the M420 or some other ridiculous chip that’s made by TSMC anyway.
apple, ipad, productivity, rant — Feb 17, 2025
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