The older I get, the higher my expectations

Root16

New member
Apr 20, 2018
2
0
0
Visit site
I think this is fair, though. We live in an age where technology is increasing exponentially, run by super-rich, super powerful companies, so it just seems reasonable that things get better exponentialially, but they don’t.

Why is iOS on my iPad Pro so inferior to MacOS and my iPhone iOS? I bought a state of the art iPad Pro last year. Testing it out in the store it was awesome. It’s more powerful than a brand new MacBook Pro (which I just returned because of its lousy keyboard and poor performance, and so-so sound). My iPad has incredible sound. And yet, for all its awesomeness it’s practically broken iOS means I use my wimpy ‘15 MacBook Air 98% of the time (literally). I barely ever use my iPad because...

1) There are very few apps designed with a keyboard in mind.
2) iOS’ autocorrect is weirdly over aggressive to the point of being beyond annoying, as compared to MacOS’s very balanced autocorrect.
3) Why can’t I zoom my screen inside apps by pinching? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? This is beyond annoying. It’s stupefying why an iOS device cannot zoom the screen! Why! It doesn’t make even an iota of sense! I can zoom my iPhone screen all day long but I can’t zoom my iPad screen? How does that make any sense at all? I’m totally baffled by this. I rely on screen zoom; it’s a huge reason I bought the iPad Pro, but somehow I managed to overlook the fact that it doens’t zoom the screen outside of certain Apple apps!

Instead of letting you pinch zoom the screen, Apple, in its infinite unwisdom, created a terribly designed, unintuitive, annoying, useless, unusable zoom “feature” where you tap with three fingers to get a useless, teeny little magnifying box. Holy crap, does anyone actually like this horrendous excuse of intelligent design?

I expect more from Apple. What a waste of an otherwise beautiful and powerful iPad. Such a shame. Wish I could have my iPad be my daily driver. :(
 
Last edited:

kataran

Ambassador
Mar 11, 2013
4,675
33
48
Visit site
Welcome to iMore

I used a few iPads in my day and found them lacking a lot of functions that should easily be there. They make an excellent POS device but not a daily personal device in my opinion.

Enjoy and Post Often
 

Just_Me_D

Ambassador Team Leader, Senior Moderator
Moderator
Jan 8, 2012
59,709
632
113
Visit site
The iPad Pro is a powerful tablet, in my opinion. I purchased the original 9.7” iPad Pro as a replacement for my aging 2009 model MacBook. For the most part, I was able to use my iPad Pro and Smart Keyboard as my computer, but I still needed it to be more computer than large iPhone. With that in mind, I knew what I was getting before I purchased it just like you did. Apple built a product and told us what it could do and we made the decision to purchase it. If we’re let down it’s because we expected more than what was promised, and that’s on us. I’ve remedied things by giving my iPad Pro and smart keyboard to my youngest son and bought a 2017 model MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro fits me far better than an iPad, regardless of the model. Unless the iPad starts running macOS, I don’t foresee me ever buying another one.
 
Last edited:

bill.davis

Member
Oct 7, 2016
9
0
0
Visit site
Odd, I find uses many daily for both my iPad and Mac. All three, actually if you count my iPhone. Different sizes for different situations/purposes/use-cases. Four, if you count my AppleWatch. Extremely useful!

Unlike the OP, most people do not need the zoom feature *everywhere*. I wear bifocals and am horribly nearsighted and still don't need or use zoom except occasionally. Mac or iPad. Any place I have ever needed it supports zoom. So without more clear examples the OP's needs, it sound like an extreme edge case with which they are damning a product for a feature that few care about. Does it sound useful? Possibly. But only possibly. I trigger zoom accidentally, too often, actually, on my Mac. Annoying.

Just my 2 cents.
 

Trees

Well-known member
Dec 26, 2012
1,171
11
38
Visit site
Having high expectations is not unreasonable in my view. Agree with bill.davis that having a few more examples/use cases may help to better understand the concern. Also would like to see more features/functionality as kataran and Just_Me_D mentioned as I think that may make iOS/iPad more feasible for me as a laptop replacement.

To see what the problem may be about, I enabled Zoom feature via Settings/General/Accessibility. Tried Zoom with BBC News, Weather Channel, and Apple Maps. While a small sample size, the feature worked well enough on all three. With iPad I find the screen is large enough and apps/information proportionately sized so I can see everything clearly (while wearing glasses). Maybe the concerns about intermittent Zoom support are when contacts/glasses are not in use?
 

metllicamilitia

Ambassador
Dec 25, 2011
5,294
4
38
Visit site
Welcome to iMore! To be a little more fair, as technology expands, so does the code. The code becomes exponentially more complicated as well. As we’ve seen with iOS 11, this causes problems when they try to split it across multiple devices without giving enough time to the build. As for iPad, I find it to be more of a good media device. Otherwise I’m on my iPhone or MacBook.
 

Root16

New member
Apr 20, 2018
2
0
0
Visit site
Thanks for the replies everyone! I probably could have, umm... tempered my post a little bit, but sometimes I get frustrated why billion dollar companies can't get simple things right. To be fair, there's only so much Apple can be blamed for how intelligently 3rd parties design their apps for the iPad. I have pretty good eye sight and don't wear glasses, but I like to zoom in to see the detail on things sometimes. I play Hearthstone on the iPad, but it's frustrating because the app won't let me zoom in on the cards to get a better look at the detail of the beautiful art (Blizzard designs the card art on 27" monitors so they don't realize that no one can see the detail if they are playing on a 15" monitor); and the graphical production values are half the fun of the game. I can't think of other places right now where zoom would be handy, but it's something I use all the time on my macbook (ctrl + 2 fingers on the track pad to quickly zoom in and out) and it's something I associate as being the most fundamental aspect of iOS (I use it all the time on my iPhone and it was the first thing I learned how to do on an iPhone some ten years ago).

Hearthstone is much easier to play on the macbook, so even though it looks much better on the iPad, there are a lot of design decisions Blizzard made that are just cumbersome (like deck building on the iPad is not intuitive the way most things on the iPhone are).

I actually bought the iPad at the airport in order to blog my travels in SE Asia, but the iPad handled blogger.com so poorly that it was too excruciating to do very basic photo insertion and writing that I gave up.