Technology
Can the reMarkable 2 replace my iPad Pro?
When the first generation iPad Pro was released I saw two opportunities for my personal workflow. One was the easy, and simply beautiful, method for my couples to sign their Australian marriage paperwork electronically. The other was for me to leave my Mac at home with my heavy travel schedule and make the iPad the computer I took away from the house.
The iPad served both of those roles quite adequately, even more so as I upgraded to the 11" iPad Pro and the second generation Apple Pencil.
The niggling feeling I’ve had for the past year though, has been that I was too closely involved with the iPad, so much so that I couldn’t see it’s flaws, and the unhealthy relationship we’d developed.
Things like: finding peace with transferring a 4K video off an SD card into the iPad and there being no status update as to how much of the file has transferred or how much longer it will take; struggling with the multi-tasking two-three apps open at once strategy called Split View and how it never really worked that well; how so many developers seemingly don’t actually use an iPad despite developing apps for it, displayed usually by the lack of iPad feature support, or forcing us to use it in portrait mode when there’s a keyboard attached and it’s in landscape mode; and finally, so many developers just refusing to develop for the iPad, Instagram most notably.
So two products were launched this year that had a real shot at replacing the iPad and my entire computing setup.
The first was the MacBook running on Apple Silicon. It runs iOS-only apps better than an iPad, and it brings the responsiveness and the speed of the iPad, to the Mac, rendering my 16" MacBook Pro with an Intel chip, obsolete. The only thing the MacBook Air with Apple Silicon did not do was give me touch and stylus.
Enter, reMarkable 2.
So I gave in and ordered a reMarkable.
First looks
The reMarkable 2, or the Remarkable as I’ll refer to it from here on out, is a beautiful product, packaged beautifully.
Set up
The Remarkable syncs with the propriety cloud service, reMarkable Cloud.
And is supported by desktop and mobile apps.
Files can be uploaded to the cloud, and when the device connects to wifi, it synchronises back and forth.
Using reMarkable
The device is beautiful to use. It’s a simple, single-use, device. It displays documents and allows you to mark them up. Imagine a regular paper notebook married to that stack of documents on your desk.
The handwriting detection is pretty amazing well, considering my handwriting is more like a scrawl.
The unit also dabbles as a PDF reader and eBook reader, a task it handles well despite not being a Kindle. I’d love to have access to my Kindle library!
Compared to the iPad Pro 11"?
The Remarkable is 100% a nicer device to hold in your hand, and to write on. I’m using the stylus that has an eraser in the head of the stylus, and the screen is what Paperlike has been trying to bring to the Apple tablet family.
I find the Remarkable easier to write on, annotate with, and hold in my hand - with or without the leather case - the only problem is that it’s not running iPadOS and it doesn’t have an LTE modem.
If you’re trying to imagine what it feels like, imagine a large and thin Kindle you can draw on.
Size and weight
The Remarkable 2 is 187mm wide, 246mm high x 4.7 mm thick, compared to an A4 piece of paper, 210mm wide, 297mm high, and you know how thick it is. Compared to the iPad Pro 11", which is 179mm wide, 248mm high, and 5.9 mm thick.
The iPad Pro 11" is actually the thinnest Apple computer ever made, but it feels like a brick after holding the Remarkable in your hand.
The Remarkable weighs 404 grams, and the iPad is 473 grams, 69 grams heavier, a 17% increase in weight as you weigh them up in your hands.
It’s certianly nicer to hold the Remarkable, and especially when you factor in covers, cases, or keyboards. The Smart Keyboard really bulks out the iPad, whilst the Remarkable’s leather folio is still quite slim and lovely to hold.
Problems
The reMarkable 2 will only connect to “regular” wifi networks, not public wifi networks requiring authentication through a website, like the Qantas Free Wifi.
And the Mac software is the slightest bit buggy, but the developers have promised fix.
Will it do the job?
The reMarkable 2 is replacing my iPad Pro. It might not have a 4G modem, Dropbox sync, or the Kindle app, but it is the best electronic ink tablet with a stylus money can buy right now.
If the reMarkable guys are reading this, I’ll throw in a last minute request for a Safari extension as well, not all of us use Chrome :).
The first rule of drone club is don’t take your drone swimming.
Today we find out if my iPad Pro is for sale
What if we banned the comments section of the internet?
Would the world be a better place if public comment functions were outlawed on the internet?
Imagine exactly the same internet, and social media, we know and love/hate today - the only difference being that you cannot comment on posts in a public manner.
You can still engage in private conversation with people, maybe even in groups up to 5 or 10. But above a certain number even group chats are banned.
The incentive is to split the broadcast of information, news, and opinion to either the masses, or micro-community.
Freedom of speech and freedom of broadcast is maintained, it’s just the comments section that is doomed.
Thoughts? Feel free to privately contact me or your friends about it.
Zoom slaughters the Apple Silicon Macs’ batteries. Every time I jump off a Zoom call I’m surprised at how much it’s dropped compared to regular usage. The circled part of this screenshot was a 25 minute Zoom call.
Pixelmator made my 11 year whale photo look a little bit better, about 10mb better
I dropped Pixelmator’s machine learning “zoom, enhance” feature called “ML Super Resolution” onto an 11 year old iPhone photo of two whales off the beach, along with all the machine learning colour grading options.
It’s still a low-fi photo, but now it’s a high-res low-fi photo.
Here’s the 35kb original.
And here’s the 11mb machine learnt super res version.
Not all iOS apps are terrible on macOS running Apple Silicon
Much has been written and podcasted about how terrible the iOS apps running on Apple Silicon situation has been a pretty poor show. But my experience has been above average.
I thought I’d showcase the apps I’d installed and used that were pretty good considering they weren’t developed for use with a keyboard and mouse/touchpad.
Despite being disallowed by the developers, a little .ipa workaround saw Instagram’s iOS app easily install on the Mac. The app is flawless from my using, scrolling, posting, and clicking around. The two glaring issues with this experience are that iPadOS’s dealing with iPhone-only apps is dismal, and that Instagram’s developers have a deep need to keep Insta off the desktop and tablet.
LumaFusion
The iPad’s and iPhone’s best linear video editor just works simply and beautifully on the Mac now.
Air Hockey (the OG)
When the App Store launched on the iPhone there was an intial blood rush of apps that took advantage of being able to develop applications on a colourful mutlitouch pocket computer. Air Hockey was one of the early releases and I remember showing it to a mesmerised friend. It plays beautifully!
DJI Go 4
I haven’t flown with it yet, but I’m excited by the idea of using my MacBook as a monitor for the DJI Mavic 2 Pro remote.
Qantas
My airline of choice has so far allowed it’s booking and account management app, and it’s inflight entertainment app to be installed on Mac and it’s mostly fine.
Overcast
The iOS apps that will shine on Apple Silicon Macs are the ones developed to the very spec of Apple’s Huamn Interface Guidelines and everything else ever preached at a WWDC session. So of course Marco Arment’s Overcast app works flawlessly, with a resizeable window, and it’s just a joy to use.
AirBnb
I don’t know if an app will be better than a website, but hey, AirBnb works.
Skip
My local coffee shop’s coffee ordering and line skipping platform of choice, Skip, works a beaut.
Cowbell
Sometimes you just need to be able to announce to people in the same room as you that more cowbell is required.
On top of this list I’ll add Good Sodoku, my little girl’s kindy social network - Storypark - and Lumy.
Instagramception #AppleSilicon
Stellar little Black Friday deal from Aussie Broadband: 250mbps down and 25 upstream for the price of 100/40 for a few months.
24 hours with a MacBook Air sporting an M1 Apple Silicon chipset
This is a black magic machine that is fast and beautiful and literally what I want in a computer.
The reviews are all true and accurate. Even for the bottom tier of Apple’s computer lineup, this is the speediest, most responsive Mac I’ve ever owned or used. Early in the year I moved to a Macbook Pro 16" to get the speed and responsiveness I’m getting from this MacBook Air, and the 16" feels like a dinosaur.
It’s whimiscal to be running iOS/iPadOS apps right on my Mac. It makes me wonder why it’s such a terrible user experience for iPadOS to run iPhone apps when it’s downright lovely on a MacBook Air.
The slow onward progression of security makes my audio apps by Rogue Amoeba feel like I’m hacking a mainframe, but we got there in the end.
The only thing to wait for now is for developers to move their apps from Intel to Universal architetures so they run even faster, and to see what on earth more professional, progressive, and well cooled Apple computers can look like.
I’ve gone from the highest spec’d portable Apple portable computer running an Intel processor, to what will undoubtedly become the slowest Apple Silicon Mac ever released, and it’s like I’ve gone from crawling to walking.
The future is bright for Apple computers.
If you really wanted to take issue with macOS Big Sur you should be protesting on the streets regarding the external drive eject icon #wethepeople
This afternoon I sold my 16” MacBook Pro so I could buy a MacBook with an M1 CPU. I prayed to the ghost of Steve Jobs and said “please don’t let me buy the wrong computer” as I struggled whether to buy an Air or a Pro and now the Apple Store is down, so if that’s not a sign …
As John Gruber said when he linked to this page of vintage Soviet control rooms, these would make for some cool Zoom backgrounds
Privacy and free can’t co-exist online
The USA military buys your data from all three free apps we love. Nothing is free. Pay for your apps.
“The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a “level” app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.”
Apple Photos’ Memories feature is getting a bit desperate when it’s like, “remember that time you crossed the border into NSW?”
Are there any nerd-like people that can point me in the direction of how to upload an image to micro.blog from a macOS automator action, and an iOS Shortcut. I’m nerd smart but not code smart, but figure I can learn. I’d love to be able to right click and upload an image/images.
The Macstories macOS Big Sur long read review
“There will always be and should be differences between the Mac and an iPhone or iPad because the hardware and input methods are different. Still, for the Mac to remain a healthy, important part of Apple’s lineup, it needs to adapt to the computing landscape of 2020 and change while remaining true to what makes the Mac uniquely suited to specific tasks. That, in a nutshell, is Big Sur’s objective.”
— The Macstories macOS Big Sur review
I can confidently tell you that the Apple Leather MagSafe Wallet fits three cards easily, no more, not even three cards and a $20 note folded up.
Apple’s underdogs series is marketing at its best.
April 2019: Apple releases “Apple at Work — The Underdogs”
July 2020: Apple release “The whole working-from-home thing — Apple”
Working on story telling at this height would honestly be so cool!
If you were wondering, I’m a massive advocate for colours and emojis in calendars.
