As of four days ago, I have been MacBookless. I had my 11" MacBook Air for about a two months and I loved it. The Air was so much more portable than my previous laptop, a 13" MacBook Pro with Retina display. Yeah, half a pound doesn’t sound like much. But combine that with the 11" MacBook Air’s much smaller footprint, and I had the makings of a laptop I actually wanted to bring to work with me. And being able to bring a laptop to work has been a great experience, especially as I started writing more. I realized that I greatly prefer that to an iPad on the go.
In short, I loved that laptop.
That said, I think I will love the new MacBook even more. So I sold the MacBook Air in anticipation for buying the new one as soon as it comes out. Consequently, I have been hobbling along without OS X for almost a week now. It has been …an experience. I will share some of that here.
I am writing this post on my iPhone 6 Plus, using a paired Bluetooth keyboard. And the last few posts I have put out—those have all been written in a similar fashion. Truly, the keyboard makes writing immensely better than without it. I can’t imagine thumb typing my ~1000 word posts due to the limitations of iOS.
The biggest take-home for me is that iOS, while seemingly an oasis for distracted-types like myself, tends to cripple me rather than enable. Yes, full screen apps make for a focused writing experience. And yes, the [bigger] iPhone 6 Plus screen makes it even easier to type longer passages on my phone. And yes, the combination of an iPhone 6 Plus and a keyboard still weighs less and takes up less space than even the 11" MacBook Air. Win, win, win.
And yet, I can’t help but miss my MacBook. And thus, I am becoming increasingly impatient for the new MacBook’s arrival.
Federico Viticci has been using iOS (mostly his iPad Air 1 slash 2) as his main operating system for years. When I say “main,” I mean “main.” Viticci doesn’t just use his iPad on the go: he uses it at home as well. In fact, he uses his iPad about as much as I used my MacBook. That’s a lot.
Going without a MacBook meant going without a keyboard. But more important than that: going MacBookless meant going without OS X. And that hurts even more than the lack of an integrated keyboard.
Consider this post. I made reference to Federico Viticci and his iPad usage. When I am on OS X, I simply Command-Tab back to Safari, and then do a quick DuckDuckGo search for site:macstories.net ipad. After finding the relevant source to support my reference, I copy it to the keyboard, and then Command-Tab back into MultiMarkdown Composer, or Byword previously. Next, I would then use a hotkey for a service by Brett Terpstra to insert the clipboard link into my text. I can do almost all of that on the keyboard. I use the trackpad to highlight the search field in the Safari window, but besides that, I can use hotkeys and other keystrokes.
On iOS, it is much more difficult than that. Now, admittedly, I do not use Editorial like Viticci, nor some other workflow aggregation app such as Workflow or Drafts.
Why not? Because I haven’t ever done any huge amount of writing on iOS. Because I have always seen OS X as my main operating system (even in the post-iPhone days), I have used my Mac to write, not my iPhone or iPad. And so, because of this, I haven’t developed complex workflows that leverage iOS 8’s extensibility to make writing easier (like Viticci has). If I were going to dedicate myself to all-iOS writing, I might change my attitude.
But I’m not going to go ‘all in’ on iOS for my writing. Maybe it’s because I grew in the days before mobile computing? Or maybe it’s because I love an attached keyboard? Or, just maybe, it is because I am a nerd? What I do know is that my ‘default’ computing experience is a conventional computer, not a mobile device. When I want to look something up, I want a keyboard and big screen in front of me so I can type what I want in a search field. I want to manipulate an exposed filesystem. I want to tweak and tweak and tweak. That is just want feels natural.
Don’t get me wrong: mobile computing is terribly convenient. Sometimes it is impractical to have a laptop with me, and in those situations, a mobile computer is invaluable. But every time I have to use my iPhone to do something I can do my computer,[1] I can’t help but feel slightly disappointed. I also feel slightly stressed, because who knows how difficult it will be to use a mobile webpage or crappy webapp? Because I prefer a conventional computer in general, it makes sense that my preferences there inform my writing preferences as well.
There are other aspects of OS X that I miss when it comes to writing. While the 11" MacBook Air’s 1366 x 768 display is definitely small compared to most laptops, it was still ‘bigger’ than the iPad’s in that I could have multiple apps on a single field of view. The MacBook Air’s display isn’t that much more roomy than an iPad Air’s, but its effective real estate is, due to multitasking. This might be coming soon, but as of right now, that’s not possible on iOS.
I also miss small things like easy affiliate linking. I recently started using an app called Affiliate, which is a menubar service that monitors the clipboard for Amazon or iTunes product links. If a link is copied to the clipboard, Affiliate automatically appends my affiliate tag before copying that new link to the clipboard. Blink is an iOS app that aims to do something similar, but ultimately cannot replace Affiliate due to limitations in iOS. The same, but different.
My MacBookless horror adventure will be over soon enough. And when it is all said and done, it will have been a good experience.
A while back, I actually toyed with going all-iOS. The iPad Air 2’s specs are quickly approaching the Core i5 processors in the MacBook Air’s. Moreover, the iPad Air 2’s abilities probably come even closer to approximating the processing power of Core M in the new MacBook I plan to buy.
Still, despite the spec prowess of the iPad Air 2, this experience has shown me that I can’t go without OS X. Ever since crossing over in 2006, the Mac OS is my home. It is what feels familiar, and it is where I do my best computing. I can’t wait to greet it again in a few weeks.
Like writing a new post for TheOverAnalyzed. In the past few days, I have actually put off writing, something I never did on during my OS X days. I am putting off writing because it is a pain to write a post on iOS compared to OS X. And that’s sad. ↩