The iPad at 10

The team at macstories has been on roll lately, with the iPad at 10 series of articles. I started reading the piece about how Federico uses the iPad as a modular computer and thoroughly enjoyed it.

This paragraph from the article makes an interesting point about the iPad morphing into different devices.

The more I think about it, the more I come to this conclusion: the iPad, unlike other computers running a “traditional” desktop OS, possesses the unique quality of being multiple things at once. Hold an iPad in your hands, and you can use it as a classic tablet; pair it with a keyboard cover, and it takes on a laptop form; place it on a desk and connect it to a variety of external accessories, and you’ve got a desktop workstation revolving around a single slab of glass. This multiplicity of states isn’t an afterthought, nor is it the byproduct of happenstance: it was a deliberate design decision on Apple’s part based on the principle of modularity.

Federico goes into much detail about different setups and his reasoning behind them. But this particular thought resonated with me a lot:

It may be a trite statement a decade into the iPad’s existence, but no traditional portable computer, from Apple or other companies, beats the iPad’s inherent simplicity when it comes to holding a large screen in your hands and controlling it with multitouch.

As I think more about why I like the iPad so much, I realize a lot of it has to do with the iPad being a slate of glass that I can directly touch and manipulate. Something about that direct-interaction aspect makes it for a fantastic reading experience, among other things.

There are more interesting nuggets in the article that Federico shares: things like kickstands to prop-up the iPad at different angles, a DAC for high-fidelity music and using a single USB-C cable to seamlessly use both the iPad and the Mac mini with a 4k monitor, to name a few. It is inspiring how tech nerds like Federico have taken what Apple has made in the iPad and make their careers and built a business around writing about it.