As an antidote for my usual spiral of sitting at a giant screen full of a dozen windows, staring, clicking, staring, clicking, etc. I thought I’d try living on my iPad for a while.

I’m not an iPad person, even though I’ve used one since the day they were released. I just don’t understand how anyone thinks they can be anywhere near as productive on an iPad as on a “real” computer. Stockholm Syndrome or something, I always figured, but smarter people than I are doing it, so who’m I to judge?

I’m drawn to the idea of being forced to do only thing at a time. iOS does that. I’d probably do more than one thing at once if I could, but “multi-tasking” on iOS remains an unusable mystery, so I’m better off leaving it alone. Anyway, you get the idea.

Basically, I’d like a break from tinkering with my system(s) on macOS (hi Emacs!), so I’m going to spend some time living on this 12.9″ (aka “Thirteen-inch”?) iPad with Magic Keyboard.

Challenges:

I’ll be forced to use the baby version of Lightroom. How will I handle exports, sharing, resizing, etc? And I hate that I don’t have control over where files go and what they’re named, but here we are.

Where does one take notes if there’s no Emacs and Org mode? Notes app? Drafts? Craft? Ulysses? Do I really want to venture into that rabbit hole again?

How do I get things from one place to another without easy access to multiple clipboards and my Mac’s desktop? How do I save things for later without Zotero? How do I do nearly anything without Alfred?

And so on.

But, iOS is calmer than macOS, and right now I need a little calm.

UPDATE July 5, 2021: The iPad is a wonderful peripheral