Riccardo Mori

After a long time without updates, finally Lukas Mathis has resurfaced (slight pun intended) with a long, informative and thoughtful article on his switch from an iPad to a Microsoft Surface Pro 2: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface. If you’re thinking about doing a similar switch, or if you don’t have a tablet yet and are considering what Microsoft is offering, then Mathis’s piece is a must-read. 

The only part where I don’t fully agree with Mathis’s observations regarding the iPad as a creation device is this passage:

To be sure, it’s absolutely possible to use iPads productively. In fact, Apple blogs love to point to examples of people who do use iPads to produce things. And yes, these people exist. There are artists who draw on iPads, and musicians who make music on iPads, and writers who write novels on iPads, and movie makers who cut their movies on iPads. But the fact that you have to point to these people, the fact that there are articles about these people, shows that they’re unusual. An artist drawing a painting on an iPad is a novelty.

If it was normal for people to use their iPads for creative tasks, there would not be newspaper articles about people using their iPads for creative tasks. The iPad will have arrived as a productivity device when news sites stop reporting about people who use iPads for productivity. So in the end, all of these links to articles about people who use their iPads to create things only seem to support the notion that this is not how most people use their iPads.

I don’t see it this way. My impression is that all the articles showing people being productive with their iPads in a way or another (drawing, writing, making music, etc.) are often contributions in response to certain prejudiced opinions that have been circulating since the introduction of the iPad. The most prominent and persistent of such opinions is — guess what — that the iPad is great at content consumption but poor at content creation. 

I’ve often found that there are some people who just parrot other people’s prejudices about the iPad, repeating the ‘great at content consumption, but sucks at content creation’ mantra without even being iPad users. And then, that there are iPad users who honestly think the iPad is not suitable for creating content simply because they don’t know about a lot of great iOS apps that can really transform the iPad into a pretty versatile production / creation device. (Some examples: Paper by FiftyThree, Procreate, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, for drawing sketching painting; for writing, the amount of text editors available is dizzying — I use Daedalus Touch, iA Writer, Phraseology and I’m trying WriteRight lately, although one truly versatile tool is Editorial; and these examples are just a speck of the tip of the iceberg — I’m not even venturing in the Business or Productivity categories…)

I think that having articles and stories showcasing how creative people can be with their iPads is a good way to help people discover such apps and use cases. I’ve personally met quite a number of ‘regular,’ non-tech-savvy iPhone/iPad users who mostly use the built-in iOS apps and install very few third-party apps. What they end up installing is for the most part the result of advice from friends or family members. Some people are simply overwhelmed by the choices provided by the App Store, to the point that they rarely dive into it. 

Mathis continues:

[…] I think it’s somewhat unusual to find iPad owners who do use their iPads for content creation on a regular basis. Even when you just look at very basic creative tasks — say, responding to email, rather than just reading email — most people seem to prefer PCs over iPads.

Maybe, but it’s not what I’ve been seeing around me where I live. Some people do prefer using Bluetooth keyboards connected to their iPads over the virtual iOS keyboard, that much I can confirm. I’ve seen people preferring Macs and PCs when they need to deal with more complex tasks requiring bigger screens and a certain spatial arrangement of various apps they need to keep an eye on while working on others. In that case, the good old personal computer, in my opinion, wins over any tablet, not just the iPad.

I very much agree with Mathis when he says: 

Not having any kind of window management or split-screen view makes the iPad much easier to use, but it also means you can’t look at an email and at a Pages document at the same time. Preventing apps from interacting with each other cuts down on complexity, but it also means that it is difficult or sometimes even impossible to use multiple apps in conjunction on the same task.

This is currently my biggest problem with the iPad, and the main reason I couldn’t use it as a complete Mac replacement, like some adventurous iPad power users have been able to do. As I wrote in A week with the iPad-as-laptop setup:

Writing on the iPad with this setup was way more enjoyable when I didn’t need to leave an application. Writing the draft of a fragment of my novel on iA Writer was great. Writing an entire short story for my Minigrooves series was great. Taking some extended notes in Simplenote, writing a post for my blog using Posts, writing a few long emails in Mail… all very pleasant experiences. So, I’m not saying it was all terrible.

But then again, I don’t think a tablet — at least in its current form — is a viable personal computer replacement: most complex workflows are more seamless on a computer, because there’s more inter-app integration. A tablet, however, can be a very capable device for impromptu, light-to-moderate work sessions, and my personal experience with my iPad 3 reflects this. I’m not using it as intensely as my MacBook Pro for productivity, but I’m certainly not limiting my iPad use to browsing the Web, doing email, watching videos and listening to music.

The rest of Mathis’s article is a very detailed and enjoyable write-up of his experience with a Microsoft Surface Pro 2. I have very little to add because my experience with the Surface is extremely limited (I wrote to Microsoft time ago, asking for a unit to review, but I guess my request was just a drop in an ocean of other requests). My first impression when I tried one briefly was that I struggled to view it as a tablet, as it felt more like a thin, ultra-portable laptop — maybe because the Surface seems to be relying heavily on its keyboard and favouring a landscape orientation. I really tried to use it in different positions, in portrait orientation, without keyboard, on my lap (the store clerk looked astonished and with a You’re holding it wrong! expression on his face), and the user experience was rather awkward. Software-wise, I can’t say I found Windows to be as intuitive as iOS, since I had to guess in too many places of the user interface to find my way around. But as I said, I spent too little time with a Surface to meaningfully discuss its merits, drawbacks, and its usability in general. The UI examples made by Mathis did leave me a bit perplexed, though, and tend to corroborate the initial impression I had — that the Surface UI looks unnecessarily complicated or convoluted in places where it could definitely use more immediacy and unambiguity.