So I wrote about how the iPad took over as my primary computing platform, up until 2020 and the first UK COVID lockdown. Let’s follow up a bit.
Obviously 2020 changed lots of things for pretty much everybody, and I was hugely fortunate in that none of my close family or friends was seriously harmed by the virus and its immediate consequences. The inconveniences of lockdown and semi-isolation pale in comparison to the real human costs that so many have endured, but nevertheless significantly altered my relationship to work, my routines, and ultimately the workflows and processes that make up my days.
Initially, as my regular teaching and meetings all moved online, I used my iPad Pro (an older 10.5” second-generation model that was then still my daily driver) for Teams, Zoom, and FaceTime meeting, but quickly came up against the limitations of both the platform (limited screen space and the oft-critiqued multitasking UI of iPadOS), and of the poorly-implemented client software (looking at you in particular Microsoft Teams) that makes managing multiple spaces and large meetings inconvenient. I’d sometimes have to use my iPhone and iPad side-by-side to look something up and maintain visibility of a chat space or call, and so the retina MacBook Pro began to make more sense again. It wasn’t long until I’d cleaned out the cruft from the old machine, reinstalled (a non-beta version of) MacOS, and set it up with the software I needed to at least get through the day in a slightly less chaotic fashion.
As remote consultancy work ramped up during 2020, and I was spending more time in collaborative design workspaces, the Mac got stretched even further. If you’ve spent any amount of time using browser-based technologies like Figma you’ll know what a resource hog they can be, inefficient with application memory and unforgiving of non-desktop browsers. Figma doesn’t even pretend to support the iPad with a native app, and third party ones are just running a fairly flaky browser-based experience anyway. It’s also pretty expansive in how it uses the display, so even a (13”) notebook gets pokey. Try hosting a Teams call, driving a shared Figma demo, and taking notes at the same time and you’ll see what I mean.
Enter Apple Silicon. I knew—as much as any non-insider did—that this was coming, and was already interested. Anything that could bring some of Apple’s ARM-based advantages to the Mac was going to be welcome. The MBP fans were being driven to helicopter-levels of noise by Teams (thanks again Microsoft), and battery life was down to almost nothing. The 2020 Intel MacBook Air that my daughter had ordered for university wasn’t much better to be honest (though faster, much prettier, and not falling apart).
When the M1 MacBook Air was announced it took me all of 10 minutes to get my order in, and while I was waiting for it to arrive I shopped around for an external display, eventually deciding that I might as well try the biggest I could reasonably imagine that worked at Mac-like resolution. (In practice it turned out to be a bit too large for me, but more on that another time.)
The difference the M1 MacBook Air made to my day-to-day work can’t be overstated. From a noisy, hot, battery-chugging slowcoach, to perhaps the fastest Mac I’d ever used for general purposes with an all-day battery life, fanless operation, and Thunderbolt ports. With a big display and external keyboard and trackpad attached I could store the MacBook vertically behind the monitor and never feel like I was on anything less than a speedy desktop Mac.
And the iPad? During lockdown and the occasional period of self-isolation I had very few opportunities to take it out, and little cause to use it for heavy lifting tasks, so it became much more of a sofa and breakfast table machine, sometimes useful for keeping secondary tasks off my desktop or taking something to a (very) occasional meeting.
There’s more to come in this story of course, but the Mac is now once again very much at the centre of my working life. Stay tuned for how the iPad started to adapt itself to other opportunities as the world began to open up again, and how I’m preparing to use the Mac for even more as the next year progresses.