“Bez, you have astonishingly little imagination, I do everything on mine now, photo-editing, all kinds of stuff … youngsters have more imagination and are more creative.“
A nice glib bit of passive-aggressive banter, but not massively helpful. The thing is that the iPad is second (or third) best to either my laptop or my phone or a pencil for just about everything.
Photography tends to fall into two camps. If I’m using a camera then we’re talking about managing, backing up and editing thousands of raw-format images – not practicable on an iPad. If I’m dealing with more casual stuff then my phone wins: the iPad’s camera hardware is no better, and it’s too big to carry all the time. Plus I can change SD cards in my phone, but not the iPad. And the phone lets me upload from anywhere.
For accurate graphics work, the iPad is no use really because even with a stylus it’s nothing remotely like Inkscape or Photoshop with a mouse.
For sketching it has potential, though again even with a stylus it’s extremely difficult to draw with anything remotely approaching the control or detail that a pencil and paper provides. (Moreover, the iPad doesn’t provide any way of locking my two-year-old out of apps, so as much as I love Paper by 53, there’s no way I can prevent stuff being accidentally deleted – which makes that no use for work.) In fairness I’ve not persisted with this aspect of it as much as I might otherwise have, since the nature of my day job – although it involves sketching on a daily basis – prevents me doing stuff in the cloud or on uncontrolled storage, so I can’t use it in anger for any significant part of work. I can see it would be a good tool for other people in this regard.
For web development, it’s clearly no substitute for the laptop, which has a keyboard and an OS where I can set up webservers and whatnot easily.
For music, I’m sure it’s great, but I haven’t done much with music for nearly 20 years and simply don’t have time to pick it up again.
It’s not about lacking creativity or imagination, it’s about it – IME, and YMMV – just not being as good as either a laptop, a phone or a piece of paper for any given creative task. Some weaknesses are down to the nature of a tablet, some are down to Apple’s way of doing things – but although I had high hopes for it being a good alternative to the laptop, the phone, or a paper pad (clearly not all at the same time) I just haven’t found it replacing any of them for even a single task.
If you know of some good applications which address some of these things I’m all ears.
For watching streamed video it’s pretty good. The only device I regularly eschew for my iPad is my telly.