iPad No Substitute For Laptop, But Has Its Virtues – The ‘Book Mystique

I’m coming to terms with my iPad. The first week was more than a little rough due to disappointment at the realization that this new addition to my digital fleet was not going to pan out as a utility infielder substitute for the 11 year old (somewhat breathed-on) tag team of two Pismo G4 PowerBooks that have been filling that role for me for the past several years.

However, week two has been better, as I gradually begin to appreciate what the iPad can do, although its strengths are pretty limited and circumscribed compared to the power and versatility of a laptop computer.

I do like the instant-on aspect of the iPad, which is tremendously convenient when one just wants to go online for a moment to look something up in Google or Bing, or just do a quick email check. Perhaps the concept of “going online” seems like a quaintly archaic construct to many younger folks for whom the ubiquity of the Internet is something they’ve almost never been without and take for granted. Not so for me. Entering my seventh decade in three months time, I was nearly 10 years old before my family got its first television, and will tie the knot on just the second year of broadband Internet access here this summer. Even that is strictly a Wi-Fi proposition, and dependent on what part of the house one is in. One of the deficiencies are the iPad is that it doesn’t seem to have nearly the range of WiFi reception that my laptops do, with the irony that I’m actually more location-limited with the ultra-portable iPad than I am with the laptops. The nearest 3G coverage is about 40 road miles distant, so immediacy of Internet access at home is still an alien concept to me, which may partly explain why the handy portability of the iPad hasn’t really grabbed me. It’s convenient, at least when you can get a wireless connection to lock on, but hardly a gotta-have-it necessity.

Two weeks with the iPad have also confirmed to me that I really am not a touchscreen fan. I remember that when I made the transition from a purely text and menu based WangWriter II word processor to a Mac in 1992, the graphical user interface was a revelation to me, and the mouse a magical tool that completed the metaphor of being able to reach inside cyberspace.

I later did make my peace with trackpads, am reasonably proficient at trackpad manipulation, and have been comfortable with finger tapping rather than button-clicking for most general work since that feature first arrived on my PowerBook 5300. However, when I have the option, I’ll virtually always go with a mouse, trackball, or rollerbar, any of which I find so much more precise and satisfactory than touch gestures. My MacBook does have the oversized buttonless glass MultiTouch trackpad, but I very rarely use the finger gestures it supports.

Consequently, with due respect to Steve Jobs’ enthusiasm, I don’t find the iPad and its touchscreen nearly as “magical” as my first Apple laptop was back in 1996. Touchscreening is just too sloppy and imprecise an interface medium for my taste. By comparison, after 15 years I’m still feeling the laptop magic.

I’m planning to pick up a touchscreen stylus in hope that will restore some of the precision of mouse clicking, dragging, and pointing. At least stylus-point precision anyway.

All this does make me more than a little apprehensive about the direction that Mac OS X seems to be going with version 10.7 Lion, with traditional Mac-OS GUI conventions that so caught my fancy 19 years ago giving way to the iOS way of doing things crossing over. And that’s aside from the termination of Rosetta PowerPC emulation support that promises to be a major disruption in headache, not so much with respect to major applications, but rather an accretion of older, smaller utilities, some which I still use every day, others that I might may start up once a month, but which I’ve gotten used to having available. Consequently, my initial foray into the Lion’s den will be a tentative one.

However, one is obliged to bow to the inevitable, and ultimately there’s no way to successfully resist whatever popularly passes for progress, so I’m resigned to the fact that Lion, the iOS, and whatever comes after, will be the future of Apple computing whether I like it or not. That resignation is a big part of why I finally broke down and bought the iPad, but I’m still amused that it seems almost every time I sit down to write about the iPad, I drift off topic and start discussing laptops.

Note that when I say “sit down to write,” I’m being literal. I am composing this screed, as I do with many of my longer form columns and articles, sitting in a comfortable chair (incidentally, one of the spots where the laptops can lock on to my router’s WiFi signal but the iPad won’t) with pen and clipboard in hand, and will enter the text later using the nifty little free Dragon Dictation app on my iPad .

Speaking of which, I’ve been very pleased with how well the dictation app from Nuance works. It’s not as slick and powerful as full-scale Dragon Dictate on the MacBook, but it certainly does an impressive job of transcribing spoken words into digital text with amazing accuracy, and with no training required. The actual transcription is done on Nuance’s servers, so the iPad’s computing power (or lack of) is not a major issue. Given my disaffection with the software keyboard (I do have a nice Logitech DiNovo Bluetooth keyboard that connects smoothly with the iPad, but it’s big), Dragon Dictate is the most powerful and significant productivity enhancer tool for the iPad that I’ve yet come across.

However, I’m still very much in the “getting to know you” stage with the iPad, and doubtless I’ll be discovering many more cool things it can do as time unfolds. I certainly don’t dislike it, despite finding some aspects of iPadding immensely frustrating, but I can’t see it greatly altering my system upgrade roadmap for my serious production machine which I still have penciled-in for early 2012.

The timing of that may actually work well for me, if, as expected, a new revision of the MacBook Air with Sandy Bridge Core “i” processors and the Thunderbolt I/O interface materializes this summer. I do remain somewhat torn between getting an Air, a machine that I find aesthetically and emotionally enticing, or a 13 inch MacBook Pro, which in practical terms would be a more sensible choice for my needs. Indeed, one effect getting the iPad may actually have could be tilting me toward a MacBook Pro rather than a MacBook Air, “I” processors and the Thunderbolt I/O ,interface rolls out in July at or around the same time as the OS X 10.7 Lion, release. That timing should ensure a good selection of Apple Certified Refurbished Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs will be available when I’m ready to pull the trigger.

But we’ll have to see. Still more than six months to go before that decision is made at the earliest, barring any unforeseen circumstances cropping up. By then the iPad and I may have become better friends than we have so far. At least I hope so.