I am an Apple sheep who was intrigued by the Framework 12 upon its announcement. I sort of forgot all about it until the pre-order email came in. Over the summer I pre-ordered about three times separately, though ended up cancelling. And then ran back to the iPad (Pro M4, Magic Keyboard, AppleCare, the works) as I knew I was bored of the Mac (especially wanting 2TB of space and the prices charged) and wanted a tablet for using it outside of productivity and sitting back to relax.
Well, the iPad came. Beautiful device. Though the first one overheated and many of the āwow an iPad can do that?ā promises like running VMs were totally crippled, in that case, no JIT so running Windows XP was unusable, let alone anything practical. Took me about three-to-four weeks to realise that. Thankfully Apple let me return it , full refund - very nice of them outside of the usual window. That weekend I re-opened my pre-order with Framework, only to find I missed the iPad and had some new solutions to my issues - namely, remote into a W11 HP laptop sitting around for full no limits workflows when needed, via a Tailscale tunnel and thatās worked well to be honest. I also thought a tablet for reading and note taking would be nice and found out the 1TB iPad and above had 16GB of RAMā¦ no more app refreshingā¦ right? So after a couple of weeks I ordered an iPad Pro AGAIN hoping the better RAM and remoting in would solve my issues the first time. As I said, other than the issues, itās a stunning device to use.
Now Iām about 7 weeks into using it. College started and my work has picked up (another reason I didnāt want to wait for the FW12 pre order). Turns outā¦ writing with a pencil on screen is way more tedious and time consuming, the notes are awful and refining them into nice study worthy format is even more time consuming! (and a bit of an ergonomic mess hunching over, waving left and right to move around the on screen page). Typing is actuallyā¦ much more practical. I also study software development, which with W11 on Remote is fine if not a tad laggy. It also turns out, the invincible iPad battery life of yester year is a thing of the past, a proper M4 chip means proper thirst when you actually use it for anything.. Iāve been annoyed by the iPad OS window system, refreshing appsā¦ then apps themselves, incredibly limited. We had to use this Jupyter notebook app for data science, well, no problem, a Juno app exists, a well designed indie app with a good rep. Ā£30, bit much but one time purchase, I bought it. Fine until some libraries and commands are blocked by iPad OS (developer canāt even implement it due to rules). Weāre talking simple commands to prepare chartsā¦ Then someone recommended this knock off Code app, very like VS code which was Ā£10, I got it, was excited. I knew it wouldnāt be full featured, but the most basic of Python practice (and opening / switching files) causes it to crash. So much for 16GB of RAM helping. Iām stuck with this very beautiful, very expensive brick when really, a very old broken HP laptop with a Pentium Gold is doing the heavy lifting.
So yes, Iām an idiot, I did the same thing twice and expected a different result. But this time thereās no get out of jail free card from Apple. Their support listened and told me everything Iām experiencing is normal and that I shouldnāt expect it to perform like a Mac or PC with memory management and how itās so efficient .. battery life.. bla bla bla. They wonāt bend this time. A business, not a charity, fine. My mistake for sure.
I listed the iPad bundle on eBay (no interest so far) and no wonder, the M5 model just dropped so anything I could have got will surely drop further anyway.
Iām thinking of taking the hit. Buying the FW12 which I now see is instant shippingā¦ But the whole madness of my moves just makes me feel uneasy. Should I think about it longer or is it time to take the hit and pay the price once, to break out of Apple and into something long-term, repairable and with the full flexibility of Windows?
