Space iPad, 1 month

The thing is dressed up as a laptop for a permanent halloween of the computing spirit. There is a trackpad, clicky keys. The keyboard even lights up. There is a USB-C port that you never asked for and don’t use.

I have found myself never using the trackpad. I accidentally trigger the trackpad vastly more frequently than I actually intend to use it. I often completely forget it’s there. I reach up to the device and touch it. I have always reached up to the device and touched it. It’s an iPad, which is the device you reach up to and touch. The trackpad might be nice for text selection, which I suppose I would do more if I edited on my iPad. But no, I write first drafts here and edit elsewhere, so the trackpad goes mostly unused. Is this a me thing or an iPad thing?

The cursor is fascinating, a little spot of translucent intention rather than the arrow we’ve all come to know & love. Was that correct? Nobody can tell you. It feels more like a school of thought than anything else. Why, after all, did we settle on an arrow in the first place? But also, why is this cursor so imprecise? Taps are centered on one element, and sometimes you really do need to nail that pixel. It would be amazing to put an opaque white dot in the middle of the cursor. But that would make sense.

Thanks to the iPad now being so light & thin that it may as well have astrally projected into the room, the keyboard is now over half of the object’s bulk & weight, bringing it firmly into laptop territory. Any slimming effort brought to the device itself was not applied to this thing. Is there a slimming team within Apple, you wonder? Were they just busy?