obsidian says this takes 11 minutes to read.
(aka: I really want a tablet again)
I noticed I’ve been using my main desktop much less in the last couple of months, not because I hate using it, but because I tend to be very tired after working sitting down, in front of another computer all day. Like, its exhausting, and the hard chair I got also doesn’t do much help too, and god forbid I try playing a game (gotta love wrist pain, lmao). So I resorted to using my laptop while laying in bed, which is this thing here. This is good and all, except for the fact this laptop weighs something in the neighborhood of like 2 kg, which makes it pretty awkward to move and to keep around, and to add to that, the laptop is built like shit, so you can kinda feel the whole thing flexing every time you pick it up with one hand and carry it somewhere else. It also has horrible battery life, and only seems to have enough battery to be able to watch 4 30 minute long videos on there as well, and then you need to connect to the charger, which makes the situation more annoying, because now you need to move the laptop around while also taking care the cable doesn’t fucking die too. The intake for the fans are also on the bottom, which means that if you try to use it on a bed, the fans would be choked up by the bed itself. Anyways, it is a gaming laptop, after all, and expecting this laptop to have decent battery life is kinda pointless, because it was never ever really built for that, to be honest (or for gaming, really, lmao)
And sure, I could use my phone, but like, the screen is pretty small, and Android on this thing is clunky sometimes, especially if you just want to relax and watch videos on there + do something else while you watch. For example, on my laptop that has Linux on it, I have a habit of keeping one window with whatever thing I am scrolling though on the left side of the screen, and then Freetube’s open on the right, and this works because Linux can do multitasking, but try to do this on Android, and yeah it isn’t that great. Split screen on Android is a thing, but often times it feels very awkward to use, and if you type in one app, the other one gets blocked by the keyboard, and viceversa. A lot of apps also do not like being squished into a smaller screen size, which makes some elements just look off. I also can’t help but feel that split screen isn’t really supported anymore in modern Android, because I barely even hear people talk about it, lmao. Picture in Picture is another option, but this only really works if the other app you want to use is playing a video, and it also can be very clunky as well, especially if you are browsing something on another app or a browser, which makes you have to resize and move the popup video player around, which can (and is) annoying to do, to be honest.
So I think I kinda want some sort of device that is kinda in the middle of my laptop and my phone, and I did used to have a device like that, which was my iPad. I bought an iPad 9th gen with maxed out storage (a total of 256GB!) back in 2022, with the stupid Apple Pencil too, and that was a pretty fine device, and it did serve me well up until 2024, which by then I was just so fucking tired of the Apple-ness of it all, like it is insane how damn locked down the thing is. Like, trying to get even third party apps onto an iPad is an exercise in frustration, like you need to set up thing A and thing B to make it work, and then provide some third party app your iCloud credentials so it can do some signature fuckery or whatever.
I tried bending iPadOS to serve my needs, but every time I did, I would encounter some stupid issue where the solution was to either deal with a subpar experience, do it the way Apple wants you to, or just get a non Apple tablet, an example of this is like, when I was trying to shove a couple thousand FLAC files into its storage, and then realizing that I needed to use iTunes, and I don’t think iTunes keeps any sort of continuous sync anywhere, so its annoying it is to keep it synced across my desktop and the rest of my devices. Normally I would use Syncthing to keep my music library synced, but in this case, that kinda doesn’t work because; 1: iPadOS does not allow background use of anything, so you need to keep any Syncthing port on the background, and 2: the one port of Syncthing on iOS/iPadOS, Möbius Sync is both a paid app (and I was too cheap to buy it, lmao) and the free version had a syncing limit of what, 10 MB? It was genuinely insulting to be like finally finding the fix to a problem and then to find out I need to pay to have the app working. On a sidenote, it is kinda crazy how often iOS/iPadOS apps do this, like they advertise “yeah dude you can do this thing for free on this app!”, so you download it, and then realize that all the essential features are behind a five or ten dollar in app purchase, which really just fucking pisses me off so much man.
Anyways, I also tried using this iPad as like a movie watching machine, and basically I would load up a bunch of Totally Legally Acquired Movies™ from another computer (another thing, you can’t really download torrents on iOS without jailbreaking, lmfao) into VLC’s storage folder in iTunes, and that would work, but the transfer speed was capped at USB 2.0 speeds (because Lightning connector, lmao), and the only app that could access these movies on that device is VLC and maybe the storage app, which is fine, I suppose. VLC on iPadOS is kinda jank, if that makes sense, and it often had a tendency to crash and burn (especially when playing music when you decide to switch to a different track). I also didn’t use much streaming services on the iPad, aside from that one free trial I got with Amazon Prime for like a month, and I thought their service was okay, I guess. I would end up binging the first season of SpongeBob too, and everything was great until I wanted to share a screenshot of what I was watching with some friends. And the screenshot had the stream blacked out, because of fucking copyright bullshit. Fucking hell. That fucking pissed me off, and I pretty much remember I kicked that Amazon video app to the void.
I remember I wanted to draw on the tablet, and I even purchased the Apple Pencil and purchased Procreate, that one drawing program every iPad artist I knew swore by. And god is Procreate not good. Like I can tell the devs know what they’re doing and the app has that typical polish you’d expect on iPadOS, but like, why is everything hidden behind 3 or 4 menus? Why there so many unlabeled things in the UI?; like load up the damn UI It is kinda funny I am complaining about this with Procreate, meanwhile I was able to deal (and eventually thrive) with Krita, a drawing program that admittedly has a terrible UI. But at least everything is shown and not hidden behind the menu dimension. I guess it didn’t help that I was a PC artist too, with my shitty drawing tablet+stylus making most if not all my art in there.
Eventually that iPad would be put into a drawer, essentially abandoned and then later sold to my sister, and she really did embrace the way the iPad is intended to be used: she uses it for streaming, watching short form media, basically using it as an appliance where you’re not supposed to think about too hard on how it works, only that it just does, and that is that. You’re expected to follow the ways how Apple intended, like how the robots in WALL-E must follow the lines drawn on the ground, and the moment you step out of that path, you immediately suffer with all these issues. Example: installing third party apps on iOS, trying to listen to FLACs on an iPad, or an iPhone, etc.
So you may ask, why not get an Android tablet? Well, because aside from like 3 models from like three different brands, Android on a tablet essentially sucks. Compared to Apple, who actually put in actual work in making the iPad what it is, Google just sat there, thumbs twiddling, expecting marketshare that never arrived, meanwhile you got Apple there, cultivating an actual ecosystem of apps and made hardware that people actually wanted to use, meanwhile Google? They haven’t done shit, and left the Android tablets to rot and die, to the point most apps don’t really support tablets anymore. Another thing is that, like iPads, 99% of all tablets that got Android on them are locked the fuck down, and you can’t really mess with them. Most don’t have bootloader unlocking, much less custom ROM support, and while Android is far less locked down compared to iPadOS, it still isn’t great man. That developer verification thing kinda ruined Android for me, and I am not willing to use a device with Google services baked it ever again.
Yet I think there would be a possible Android based solution here, and that is to upgrade to some sort of folding phone. On my last post here, I was very much considering getting myself a used Pixel Fold, and then shoving either LineageOS or GrapheneOS, whichever works. The downside is that, I would end up dealing with a folding phone, and folding phones aren’t known for their reparability, just look at that 3/10 repair score, lmao. Another thing I should point out is the cost of the inner folding screen, it apparently costs something around the neighborhood of $760 dollars, which is wayyyyyy too much for a phone that can be found for 500-600 dollars, damn. And sure, maybe the inner screen may not break, but the screen is plastic, and plastic fatigues, and fatigued plastic splits apart in two.
Surface tablets also would be a good idea, I suppose. They are essentially computers that you can boot anything on there, from Windows to Linux, and I bet there has been at least one guy who managed to shove macOS on one, too. The thing is that, Surface tablets need some work to make it work properly with Linux. Apparently they need custom Linux kernels to get stuff like the touch screen and cameras working, or to get that fancy cover keyboard to work. And the fact that they’re based on the x86 architecture means that the battery life on them are probably not great, and trying to repair them (in the case I want to upgrade the storage or maybe switch the battery) looks like a pain in the ass, and really makes me not want to deal with a Surface tablet at all. And Linux probably sucks for touch screens, so there’s that. Another thing that I noticed, is that Surface devices sold on the second hand market here are the 2GB RAM and 128GB of storage variety, which are pretty much unusable in the big ’26, even in Linux honestly. The Framework 12 would also probably make a good option, but it is way too expensive for me to just buy it, ffs.
I guess, finally, there are those handheld gaming PCs. Stuff like the Steam Deck would probably be a good option for both playing while laying on bed as well as just watching videos or whatever. It would probably have a decent battery life for this purpose, ngl. Sadly, the Steam Deck isn’t officially sold here, which means resellers and scalpers can set whatever price they want. I’ve seen some LED 256GB models being sold at 500 dollars, which is 100 dollars over MSRP, meanwhile OLED models are insanely expensive here, sadly.