I’ve been using the mouse-and-keyboard method for the bulk of my work since I started working at my college newspaper in the fall of 1989. That’s 26 years of clicking and cursors and windows, and it’s just as tough to get out of that mindset as it was for the users of command-line systems to understand all the early Mac-inspired mouse-and-cursor interfaces.
I could list dozens of things that I can do on my Mac that I can’t do on the iPad. But you know, when I bought a Mac, PC (and Apple II) users told me the same thing about what they could do on the command line.
The Mac had power features and tweaky settings and other weird tricks, but they weren’t the same as the ones you could do in DOS or AppleSoft Basic. Likewise, the iPad app I’m writing this in (1Writer) has an entire JavaScript-based macro language behind it, and I can kick off complex actions via a sharing extension powerered by Workflow. The iTunes affiliate links in this paragraph have been generated not by a script on my desktop Mac but by an iOS app running in Slide Over, Blink.
This really summarizes my biggest personal concerns with bigger tablets. The Surfase and iPad Pro don’t appeal to me. If you video tape my fingers as they put together the hyperlink at the start of the article, the italicized writing, block-quote, copy and paste, shift key for quotes, mark this under category “linked” and switch between BBEdit, Safari and MarsEdit to get everything copied here without the format of the browser text I’m copying….doing that on an iPad would probably take 3x longer even once I got used to the repetitiveness of the task on a touch screen.
I really can’t imagine a world where getting work done is faster without a keyboard and mouse and multi-window multi-tasking.