Dave – A huge way to simplify your life is just use ONE computer… a laptop. I used to have a Mac mini and a 13-inch MacBook Pro but decided to try using just the MBP hooked up to my old 27-inch LED Apple Cinema Display. So glad I tried that!
Sold the mini. Now I just deal with ONE computer to back up and maintain. I did purchase a CalDigit TS3 Plus dock that is connected to the MBP with a single Thunderbolt 3 cable. Whenever I want to go mobile I simply eject my external drives and unplug the dock cable.
I have one main computer, a loaded 27” iMac. The laptop is a secondary device for when I need it, primarily teaching, where I can have synced just some material and key applications.
One, as an Apple shareholder (with an investment that started out at about $150, 19 years ago): Great, please keep it up.
Two, as another human being: We’ve sacrificed a lot for a little convenience. That doesn’t mean that each of those wondrous, magical, devices isn’t fun, useful, and occasionally essential. But most of use could probably live without the full set, and give the money to a worthy charity, or spend it on a family vacation, or just sock it way in your retirement fund. When, as you clearly do with the iPad, you have a need for work or personal fulfillment that isn’t going to be met another way, go for it. I tend to split my time between an iPad and an iMac, but yeah, I have a phone, too.
The only solution I think of is to try to live without one of the less essential devices for a while, say a week, and see if it really made a difference (other than the initial stress over not have the iThingie right there when you wanted it.
It’s tempting to wonder if Apple doesn’t at least do a little sandbagging on their hardware consolidation efforts because of the potential revenue impact. Though the recent releases with iPad+keyboard+pencil are certainly evidence to the contrary, although it’s anything but cheap. But it would certainly aid with Apple Device Overload
I will say that, before I finally caved and bought an iPad last year, I did “unfold” my laptop the best I could and stuck it on the music desk on my piano a few times.
Very clumsy and awkward. And no way was that going to work while playing out. (I’d love a bigger screen for my aging eyes, but the 12” is insanely more pricy than my 10”.)
And I could really reserve the iPad for performance, but the essential sheet music app doesn’t run on anything but iPadOS. I have asked them to enable Apple Silicon support!
I should have added that when I was still working (I’m retired now), I had the use of a MacBook Pro, but I really only used that when I was traveling for work, primarily for use in giving talks. Then they changed the rules, purportedly for the sake of security, so we could only read corporate e-mail on a corporate-owned machines. As a result, I had to schlep the laptop back and forth every day. When it finally penetrated that nothing but bureaucratic bumf was coming in those messages — all the mission-critical messages came from another mail server that wasn’t under that restriction — I decided that I didn’t need to bring the machine home any more. The final straw was when the powers that be decided that we couldn’t take our normal laptops with us on travel abroad. That made me look at foreign travel as an opportunity for a working vacation from frequent e-mails from an overly chatty bureaucracy. I just brought along my personal iPad and phone instead. (Sadly, given the work I had been doing for over thirty years, I always think in terms of redundant systems. Maybe if I live login enough, I’ll start getting over that.)
Apple has said that it’s happy to cannibalize its own product lines, and the iPhone certainly did that to the iPod. But as has become clear in this thread, people have a lot of different use cases too, so it makes sense for Apple to make more products than they used to.
I have no dispute with a rich product line to support many use cases. It’s not the overlap that’s the problem. It’s the LACK of overlap that’s the problem, forcing me to need multiple devices to accomplish a single workflow, in some cases.
And the related problem - teasing me into thinking I can accomplishing something on one device, until I hit a functionality or convenience limit, forcing me to switch over to another device to finish the job.
Can you give examples of this? I can think of workflows that are easier with multiple devices due to Apple’s integration, but I can’t think of any offhand that require them in some non-obvious way (like, getting SMS messages on a Mac without having an iPhone).
I think that’s a subset of the use case scenario. If you don’t need the full power of Pages on a Mac, for instance, perhaps you can get by with Pages on an iPad. Different use cases, and the trick is just figuring out what those limitations will be.
To my mind, a Mac and an iPhone are what’s core, and after that, it’s about personal scenarios and preferences.
Sandbagging was something Steve Jobs became notorious for. Investors, analysts and journalists do not like to be deceived, so the practice at Apple was curtailed over a decade ago:
I still wish they hadn’t killed the Shuffle, I really think it was a nice niche. What was its replacement supposed to be, the watch with AirPods? Which doesn’t work for me as it’s easy to smash things on my wrist while mountain biking. I can tuck the Shuffle inside my shirt. I wish I’d bought more than one when they discontinued them!
I’ll give 4 examples, possibly in increasing significance. But the cumulative effect makes me feel like Apple Device Overload:
Watch → iPhone - we know the watch wasn’t meant to function without an iPhone (though it’s moving more in that direction). But still: I workout, but then I have to go back to my phone to see any decent level of detail. I wore my watch to bed, but only the health app shows me useful sleep stats. When I get a Facebook message, its notification consists of a profile pic of the person who sent it to me. Useless! Yes, there’s only so much you can fit on a watch. But still, I keep trying to work with my watch and finding myself looking for my phone.
MacBook → iMac - This point is about storage and iCloud. I can’t fit the 1.3TB Photo Library on my MacBook, so that uses Optimized Storage. But then if I want to edit or export, I’m at the mercy of iCloud’s generosity in downloading the files. Modern hardware and 75Mbps internet notwithstanding, performance is not snappy. I frequently bail and head to the iMac.
iMac → iPhone - This is about feature parity. When I shoot videos of my band, I often want to crop them after the fact to zoom in on the band, removing needless background space. And sometimes I want to lighten the shadows. I can only perform these two functions on iOS, not macOS (don’t know about Big Sur yet). But I also need to Trim the beginning and end of the videos. This is very challenging to do on iOS. You have to precisely grab the playhead without grabbing the trim edge - or vice versa. Very aggravating. Much easier on a Mac. But now a bunch of ~1GB videos have to sync to the Mac, which takes a while if it doesn’t get stuck in the cloud for a day or so. And then, of course, the switching devices to finish the job. The Mac is also much easier to mass upload videos to YouTube.
iPad ↔ Mac - Note that this movement is bidirectional. The core issue here is the complete incompatibility between iPadOS and macOS. My music is all managed in iGigBook Pro, an iPad app. Essentially, it’s a sophisticated PDF indexer/manager/presenter. Where do these PDFs come from? Sometimes I have created them using MuseScore annotation software, which I can only do on macOS. Or, I edit a PDF that I found online. There are PDF-editing tools on iPad, but Preview on macOS is not only free and familiar, but is easy to use with a mouse and keyboard. So then I rely on Dropbox to sync the resulting files to iPad, where I can import them to iGigBook Pro for organizing play lists, etc. But if I find one little edit I need to make, I need to go back to the Mac and start all over. And this is music, people. There will constantly be edits.
So, for a variety of different reason, I’m constantly juggling devices. Remember when we just had a PowerBook and that’s it? Life was so simple.
Not so much with watchOS 7. Open the activity app (or tap the complication) and any workout you’ve done that day is listed below the ring stats and is tappable, and the only data that is missing from the Fitness app on the iPhone is the map (for an outdoor workout), the heart rate graph (though average rate is there), and mile/kilometer splits.
(By the way, it’s a little weird that Apple renamed the Activity app to Fitness on the iPhone but not on the Watch.)
Yea I do think there is improvement. Untethering the watch from the phone, the phone from the Mac… and merging iPad with the laptop experience. But yet…
I suspect a big reason why the Watch is tethered to iPhone is because it’s currently impossible for the all the hardware, including a teensy battery that burns up quickly, crammed into a tiny space to speedily run complex software, accommodate multiple apps and keep its screen lit up. The big selling point for Watch is that is infinitely customizable and offers a myriad of use cases and apps. There are some things Watch can do without connecting to iPhone, but not very much at all.
I’ll bet the farm that Apple would decouple Watch from iPhone if they could, and that they will as soon as they can figure out how they can. Sales of iPod went through the roof and became an unstoppable force only when Apple released a model that would run on Windows. It took a few years before Apple could get an always on Watch screen up and running; I guess it’s taking longer to figure out how to keep Watch’s lights on when it’s away from iPhone.
Probably not. I own an Apple Watch 5 LTE and a Garmin Fenix 5+. Two different devices for two completely different uses. The AW is a lousy fitness device, the 5+ a lousy smart watch.
So far this morning electronics I’ve used include my iPhone 11 Pro, my Apple Watch, my AirPods Pro, my Garmin Edge 830 (controlling my Tacx Neo 2; it’s raining this morning), my ancient Garmin chest belt for heart rate, my 2015 MacBook Pro, my Anker Bluetooth speakers (cheap but effective) and my 2010 MacPro. Before the day is through I’ll use my HomePods and my iPad mini. In the last week I’ve also used my Garmin VIRB 360 and my GoPro Hero 8 as well as various Garmin sensors (speed, cadence, HR, Varia radar). (The Fenix 5+ only really gets used in the winter when there’s snow.) I’d rather not do without any of those. This is about as minimal as I get so far as electronics goes these days.
There’s no argument here, but I don’t think there’s any controversy either. Apple is completely and utterly clear about how an iPhone is necessary to use an Apple Watch. While it might be nice if the Apple Watch could stand alone, it’s just not possible right now.
Indeed. @das and @jcenters and I talked about this a bit too, and his thought was that the battery life issue was the really big one. The Apple Watch relies on Bluetooth to its companion iPhone whenever it can because Bluetooth is much less power-hungry than Wi-Fi or cellular. That’s also probably why an Apple Watch has to pair with an iPhone, rather than an iPad or Mac, neither of which are likely to help with the Bluetooth communications while out and about.
The other big issues revolve around the setup experience, authentication, and connecting to the rest of one’s Apple ecosystem information. All those things are solvable problems, but until the hardware can stand alone, it’s likely not worth Apple putting much effort into addressing them. (The way Family Setup allows multiple watches to tether to a single iPhone is a small step in that direction.)
Again, no argument, except to say that this doesn’t seem to be Apple’s fault in any way. You’re in the situation only because you’re trying to make do with hardware that can’t possibly do what you want. If you bought a new MacBook Pro with 2 TB or 4 TB of storage, you could store the Photos library on both Macs without having to resort to Optimized Storage and the inevitable limitations it imposes.
Good example. I’m generally not bothered when the iOS version of an app is weaker because it makes sense that it wouldn’t be able to replicate the full power of a Mac app. But when the Mac version is weaker, it’s just off-putting.
I think this comes down to needing to pay a few bucks for a PDF editor for iPadOS. Any time you’re bouncing back and forth just so you can use Preview on the Mac, you’re probably wasting more time than the cost of an iPadOS PDF editor. PDFpen for iPad is $6.99 right now. GoodReader is $5.99, I think. PDFelement is free.
Strava does relative effort with the data from a Garmin (or really anywhere else that provides heart rate), too. Of course, your 620 probably doesn’t have a built in HR sensor, but unfortunately it’s standard with newer Garmin watches. If you have a Garmin device that supports ConnectIQ, Strava provides a ConnectIQ data field that (poorly) shows Relative Effort during the activity. (I say poorly because it never agrees with what you get after the fact on Strava itself, but at least it’s in the ballpark.)
Yep. I actually have the chest strap heart rate monitor for my Garmin, but (a) I hate wearing it, (b) it’s fussy to get to work, particularly in colder weather because it needs a little sweat to make the the connection, and (c) if I remember right, last time I tried to use it, I couldn’t get it to pair at all.
I’m considering getting a new Garmin watch that would have wrist-based heart rate now that I’m running again, especially since the battery on my 620 is getting weak enough that it’s not entirely reliable. The only problem is that, without races during these pandemic times, I’m also not doing the kind of pace- and lap-based training where I need real-time data on my wrist. The Apple Watch has proven good enough for capturing my GPS track and thus mileage and time and relative exertion.
