Not so interested in a new iPAD
I've been a very big PowerBook and now MacBook since the PowerBook 100, absolutely love them. I just pre-ordered the new ultra thin MacBook and can't wait to get my hands all over that beauty. The iPad though, well not the physical hardware as it's near perfection but the OS inside, iOS, is something I really dislike. Aesthetically it's nice, though I wish they would use more of that flat look with every app. Anyway here is a list of things that prevent me from embracing the platform.
Lack of full multitasking, running any app of my choosing in the background and not just those that Apple deemed worthy. I bought an iPad Air so I could run all of those wonderful music creation apps. The thing is I wanted to use it for live music, which means I need at least three apps running at once, the synthesizer, beat, melody. No go in iOS, I have to use a DAW to insert each individual sound bite and than play. So I would need to purchase three iPads to do what I wanted.
I can't choose the default apps that I want. I use Chrome as I have other gear that isn't Apple, Chrome allows me to have all of my sites, passwords, etc across all of my machines. Hangouts, not all of my friends have an Apple device so we all use BBM and Skype, which are both available on multiple platforms. Mail, I now use Outlook.
The Share functionality in iOS is pretty awful. Even though I have the app that I want to use with Share installed on the system, if the app you want to share from isn't preprogrammed to handle the destination app, it isn't listed. So things like a cloud storage is a crap shoot, where as in OS's like Android, once I've installed say Box, every app that can save to a file can access the Box client or pretty much everyone, there are still big corporate apps like MS Office that are hard bent on my supporting those services that they want. Still there are workarounds as some file managers can mount cloud storage services as local assets. Which brings me to my fourth.
The way iOS handles files, well, just sucks, it's not intuitive at all. On my Macbook I have a directory called, " Home", under that directory I have subdirectories, “Documents”, “Music”, “Videos”, “Photos”, “Programming”, etc. I always know where my files are, making things like backing up, searching, copying to an external device those files very easy, etc. Saving files under each individual app just makes no sense to me, even for security reason, by the way there is an unused home directory when you open up a terminal under a Jail-Broken iPad so it’s not like it isn’t possible for Apple to go back to the sane way of handling files. This walled garden concept might sound good on paper but in reality it’s a nonsense way of doing things which brings horrible inter-app communication, files spread out everywhere and making multi-user support a pipe-dream as iOS would have to reinstall each app again for each user.
Those are my big ones but there are lots of little issues like not being able to add or remove items in the quick settings panel or why do I have to log into each Apple service individually when I set up a new device, in Android it’s once, which gets me into my mail, messaging, etc. I still have my iPad for the aforementioned music creation apps, though unfortunately I can only use a single app at once so I use it mainly with the Roland Sound Canvas, Korg iMS-20 and PropellerHead Thor app, basically apps for my Alesis V125 keyboard. My other tablet functions go to my Nexus 9, Nvidia Shield and Surface Pro 3 which is actually a great machine for Avid ProTools.
I didn’t mean to talk trash about Apple as I do like their laptops and OSX a whole lot but their portable systems have much to desire. At least those are my feelings on the matter, hopefully Apple will one day stop treating us like we are children and give us a little more freedom in those devices.
