I’ve been trying a bit of an experiment on my current trip and I’m still skeptical about iPad plus Magic Keyboard. Better than alternatives but still so-so. I think I’ll go back to my 10+ year old MacBook Pro but unless something really changes I’ll just pick up an Air for traveling at some point.

I switched to using my iPad Pro M5 + Magic Keyboard nearly full time. I use it for literally everything and also have it connected to an external monitor.

The only asterisk is that I also own a Mac Mini but I keep it attached running headlessly to my router and access it from the iPad via Jump Desktop and only use it exclusively for dev work (I only use a single external monitor anyway even with a normal Mac) or if I really need Chrome occasionally. But macOS used in that way feels almost native to the iPad.

Prior to this I was looking at an MBP and selling the iPad but this has convinced me to stay with it for the time being and maybe just upgrade the mac mini to a studio instead and continue to use it remotely.

People hate on it but so far I've been using it this way and it really feels next gen to the point that using a Macbook with macOS vs. the iPP + iPadOS feels genuinely archaic. With the latest iPadOS beta too things have gotten better on the Safari from as well and tabs no longer refresh as aggressively (though it's not perfect still).

Not to mention the significantly higher amount of security with iPadOS and AppleCare benefits (specifically theft protection) that comes with this setup.

If Android desktop mode improves a bit more and the Motorola devices for GOS next year look good then it wouldn't be inconceivable that I could drop my devices from 3 to 2 and not need a proper PC or Mac at all.

Certainly the Magic Keyboard is way better than any alternatives I’ve seen. Have tried to give it a good shot but maybe just haven’t tried hard enough and default back to what I’m used to.

When I get home need to ponder a bit more because some gear is very old or was declared to be unsalvageable after smoke damage from a kitchen fire.

I was somewhat shocked a while back when a coworker told me that they offered their kid a laptop for school work and the kid apparently said : Thanks but I’ll stick with my phone.

Whenever I read this I think "why are they even asking? You tell the kid hw and projects are done on the computer and that's it."

When I had trouble concentrating and learning 7x8 and random ones around there, my dad made me stand facing a wall so I would concentrate lol. Not in a forceful way, but it was his tool to make sure I concentrated til I got it.

I can't imagine him watching me make a major life mistake like trying to learn and practice my work on a phone instead of sitting down at a desk.

And dealing with a lot of that crap is more trouble than many of us want to be filling our days with. Micro-optimizations I might have done as a student I mostly don’t do today.

In many places, garbage collection is done by competing private firms.

At higher levels, I think impromptu calls/messages of a time-sensitive nature are probably more common. But, in general, phone calls out of the blue are less accepted than they were 10-20 years ago outside of a very close circle. And in business there would probably be a preceding message to the effect of “can we chat?”

Yes this is one of the few things that have actually improved over the last decade or so. I love this practice of asking first.

Don’t come to many countries in Europe then.

Arguably Linux wouldn’t have happened absent GNU although a lot of people I know argue that BSD would have eventually evolved to someplace like where Linux is today in spite of various legal and community factors holding it back.

The bottom line is that a lot of software types assume the cathedral vs. bazaar refers to closed source vs. open source and they’re simply wrong.

Although it’s also the case that people like me owned cell phones for quite a while but didn’t use them to any material degree especially for personal uses for a while.

Per minute costs were expensive, roaming from your local city took a lot of work, they were bulky bag phones and you still had to pay separate long distance charges, I’m not surprised.

Sprint changed that in the late 90s where all calls were 10 cents a minute anywhere you were calling from and too and you stayed on their network.

Exactly. I eventually bought one and then an other and chose a calling area that was most likely to correspond with people I might communicate with on trips and the like but it was backup/emergency use. Not something you used personally day to day or even maybe week to week.

When I actually climbed one of the 6K meter peaks I had to get some special alpine insurance. Don’t remember the details. Was a long time ago.