After a lot of stressing1About 70% legitimate, 30% performative about buying yet another tech gadget, I got an iPad mini last spring. I’d been impatiently waiting for Apple to release an updated model, but it eventually became clear that a) they wouldn’t, and 2) I didn’t really need an updated version, since the current one (“6th generation”) does everything I wanted one for.
I had imagined all the ways that my new life post-iPad mini would be so much richer and more fulfilling. With such a portable and powerful device, I could have all the best of an e-reader and a video player and a word processor and a sketch pad and a notebook! I would take so many notes. It would break whatever mental block had taken over in 2024 and make me super ultra productive. All the time I waste with social media would now be spent with personal and professional enrichment. I could satisfy my reading goals and also get back into comics! It would encourage me to practice drawing every day, like my artist and cartoonist heroes, as I’d idly whip out a sketch and see my work improving over time. I’d start journaling again! I’d become one of those people who seems deeply contemplative until he’s suddenly struck with inspiration and simply must pull out a pen to take down a brilliant insight.
Surprisingly, these things did not happen.
At some point between 2013 — when I first picked up an iPad mini and felt a shaft of heavenly light spotlight me in the middle of an Apple store — and 2025, the device that had seemed like the ultimate concentration of personal computing power in the most perfect form factor had become instead a bunch of disappointing compromises.
For reading anything besides comics, a dedicated eInk-based ebook reader is better. And for reading comics, a larger iPad is better. I’ve gotten dependent on a larger iPad for drawing art for my games, and the 11″ iPad also turns out to be better for anything that needs a keyboard, making it nice for when I’m traveling and don’t want to carry a laptop around.2My main computer is a 14″ MacBook Pro, so the only reason I don’t want to carry it around isn’t because of the size of weight, but because I’m too paranoid about anything happening to it! And as for portability, the iPhone is the only device that I’m pretty much guaranteed to have with me at all times, so I tend to use it for photography, quick bursts of reading books, watching videos while traveling, and listening to music.
Maybe the most damning: I’ve tried every single note-taking app I can find on the iPad mini, and none of them works exactly like I want. Every single time I’ve been inclined to take down notes or capture ideas, I’m instead distracted by thinking of all the ways I wish that the note-taking app itself were better.3For the record: Goodnotes is still the front-runner, but it still feels kind of clunky and inelegant to me. I’m still planning how my own perfect notes app will function once I actually develop it, which I’ll surely do in my clearly infinite free time. But that will require me to re-re-learn how SwiftUI works and Apple’s ML frameworks for shape and gesture recognition, so I’d better go onto YouTube to see if there’s an easy-to-follow tutorial, and by that point I’ve forgotten what I wanted to take notes for.
Normally, when I find myself in the middle of a tantrum about how I can’t have my One True Perfect Computing Device, my first impulse is to blame myself for being spoiled. Oh, you’re able to get state-of-the-art technology that’s the result of decades of research and people working tirelessly to build it for the tiny sliver of the world’s population who’s able to afford it, and you’re disappointed? Are you sure you’re not just grouchy from having to sleep with that pea under your mattress?!
But looking around now, not just at the sorry state of tech in the US but the specific reasons I’m looking for a new device, it’s become undeniably clear that I’ve been expecting perfection from companies that are financially incentivized to keep their products imperfect.
If anyone is hoping for a “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” screed to fist-pumpingly agree with, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. I’m in the camp that believes that capitalism has worked out mostly all right my whole life, and it only gets to be a problem when people forget about their responsibilities to be human beings and instead just care about infinite wealth and infinite returns.
In any case: it definitely feels like the tide has shifted over the past 10-15 years, and the kinds of anti-consumer compromises we’ve had to put up with have had less and less to do with technological limitations, and more to do with making sure that rich people remain ever-increasingly rich. And we’re trained to think of them as “first world problems,” which seems designed to put all of the blame on the people buying stuff hoping that it will solve a problem, instead of the people designing and selling it knowing that it won’t.
Here’s a list of grievances to illustrate what I mean:
- An 11″ M4 iPad with a keyboard case could handle everything that I need a computer for when traveling, except that iPad OS has strict limitations on the software that can be run on it, in particular no development software for e.g. working on Playdate games.
- Still, the iPad would be a good all-around traveling computer except that airlines have squeezed so many seats into their planes that, especially if you’re a larger person like me, there’s no longer room for even an 11″ iPad to sit comfortably open with a keyboard attached, or even propped up to watch video.
- It wouldn’t be that onerous to travel with multiple devices except that while they’ve increased the number of seats, they haven’t increased the number of overhead compartment spaces, so everyone is trying to make sure that everything fits into a carry-on back that won’t get checked.
- The concentration on a smaller tablet was prompted by wanting an outlet for downtime/nervous energy that wasn’t social media, especially Instagram. I’m planning to take a detox during the month of March (at least), and hope to replace all the time I would’ve been looking at social media apps with more constructive reading and writing.
- Except I use a Kindle Oasis as my dedicated e-reader, and Amazon as my primary source of ebooks, and I’ve canceled my Amazon Prime subscription and resolved never to buy anything from Amazon again, as much as I can possibly avoid it.
- Several different notes apps have the features I’m looking for, but no app has all of them. The most dominant ones require ongoing subscriptions, and it sure feels as if they’ve stifled competition with a single model for how these apps should work.
- I still get frustrated quickly when I try to work on SwiftUI apps instead of the UIKit models I’m used to, and I’m still trying to think of a way to blame that on Apple instead of myself.
- When I first tried an iPad mini, there was a stark difference between it and everything else sold by Apple. Now, the iPhones have gotten larger, while the powerful iPads have gotten thinner and lighter, and the lack of a single device that does everything well seems like a deliberate attempt to maintain product differentiation when there technically doesn’t need to be.
And if I’m being honest, I think I was attracted to the iPad mini in particular because of overly romanticized images I’m still hanging onto, of Henry Jones Sr. with his cherished grail diary, and the Microsoft Courier video, and watching Adam Koford fill another notebook with sketches. I had this idea of a small tablet as a very personal computer, one that I’d take with me wherever I go, and it would finally turn me into a Notebook Guy since I didn’t have to worry about running out of paper or the lack of undo.
I’d always imagined that the barriers to creating that “perfect notebook” would be technological ones, and it’s depressing to realize that the real reason it doesn’t exist is simply because there’s not enough money in it.
Posted this on bsky but I see you’re taking a break from there.
This won’t help with the number of devices, but the Supernote Nomad may be worth investigating as a dedicated digital notebook which could also serve as an e-reader (with access to Kindle for your current books to boot). I bought one in January and have been extremely happy with it. It has an excellent feature set for note-taking, and is distraction free outside of notebooks and e-reader functionality. It has online sync but stays offline unless actively syncing. It’s also a great size, the same width as the Kindle Oasis, but about an inch taller.
Also, it’s super forward-thinking in its design. User-replaceable everything.
Thanks for the recommendation! An eInk-based device is never going to be my perfect digital notepad, though, because it’s only going to get traction if it’s a device I’ve always got me with me. So I’ll need it for artwork and playing videos and all the stuff that iPads are good at.
I can see the appeal of something that’s not a single-purpose device, but it is more focused, like an ereader + notepad, but personally I was hypnotized by the old Microsoft Courier demos, which seemed to be designed around the idea of maximalism instead of minimalism, always having access to ALL the stuff you could possibly want.