Finding a third place helps a lot. For me, it's church. That's my community that's outside of work and family. But I also have hobbies (karting, gun range, etc.) and through that, I meet new people.
Church works for me because I tried to pursue one based on the quality of its small/home groups and not just off Sunday service. Most people are going to find a Sunday service they like and find themselves stuck trying to actually find community. I think it's fair to say churches are failing to facilitate small groups better. It's not just having them, it's spawning new ones regularly, making sure to reach all the demographics. It takes a lot of resources to do that, which means maybe pastor needs a slightly smaller trendy shoe budget.
When we immigrated to the US, my siblings and I used to dumpster dive as kids and we were surprised how much stuff Americans were throwing out. Our first year, we managed to get a couple TVs, old game consoles, old computers. All still very usable. We obviously cleaned them up and took them home and managed to get a couple more years of use out of them.
I recently did something similar with a iMac G3. It was pretty fun to relieve some of my childhood past. We didn't have an iMac at home but we did at our school computer lab and the bright colors made the computer feel not only approachable but also fun. There's still a pretty active PPC community out there by the way.
They are solid for audio production too, with a lot of fairly powerful DAWs. (Like AUM or Loopy Pro.) you can even connect MIDI instruments from other apps into the DAW and then play them with a connected midi controller, add USB audio interfaces for multitrack recording and live performances, etc.
Or it can be a glorified PDF reader for sheet music (with a nice pencil to boot)… and it’s also great for drawing.
They’re very powerful devices. Sure, iOS is limited, with poor multitasking workflows. But you can still write very powerful apps for iOS.
My Samsung tablet replaced my dead netbook, it is perfectly fine for the occasional computing needs I had during travel, that I originally bought the netbook for.
I get to watch hardware accelerated videos, that the Linux distros on the netbook never managed to after Flash was gone never managed to get VAPI working.
I get to play games, designed for Android, without needing to translate Windows/DirectX on the go, because studios can't be bothered to port Android/NDK into GNU/Linux.
I get to read ebooks and take notes with the pen.
The detachable keyboard is good enough for short sessions of writing documents, sheets, travel planing, playing with shader code, python and C# development snippets on the go.
I am an avid iPad Pro user (on #3) but it took me making a concerted effort to unlearn over three decades of my understanding of what a computer is to me, my old standby app favorites, and to be willing to force myself to use the new instead of leaning on the comfortable old. Prior to that I’ll admit that it was an entertainment device. Now it can basically serve all of my computing needs.
What caused me to make the switch is the portability, battery, immediacy, and cellular option. For me it provides the utility of a smartphone and laptop, but with a better form factor
I hated it at first but its use quickly became second nature. Caveat here is I no longer write code or require total configurability into the bowels of the machine…and to date, for me, I haven’t found a computing task that I need or want to do that it cannot handle.
I bought the iPad Pro 11 (M4) on its release day and did the same thing you did: throwing out what I knew to adjust to new paradigms. I regret its purchase. It is still fundamentally a device that cannot handle code-based workflows, although it's OK for some media creation.
For software development, the canonical advice consists of excuses that rely on a "Pro" device to be a thin client. Remoting out to a workstation somewhere else defeats the purpose of having an M4 in the tablet itself. I can't even run a VM with native virtualization. A Chromebook with Crostini offers more functionality in this regard.
You are also a consumer in another way: iOS revenue models are optimized for rent-seeking, whereas that is only partially true for macOS - even for Apple itself. As an example, I use Logic on the Mac and I pay for it once - Logic for iPad is subscription based.
I don't hate the idea of the iPad overall - I have an iPad mini I use to read and mark up papers, and it's great for that.
Yeah I am probably the perfect customer for it. It ticks all the boxes I need and I don’t mind the subscriptions.
I also don’t get hung up on the whole “What ‘pro’ should mean” debate. I bought a new 11 pro M4 mainly for the screen and its usability in bright daylight, but I also don’t mind having excessive horsepower either. Rather have too much than not enough.
I see visual artists and musicians having some decent use cases for them. Everyone I know who has an iPad that isn’t one of these professions is usually using it as an expensive portable streaming device
I use mine all the time for taking notes, keeping up with my calendar, and just for staying organized in general. The Apple Pencil is so smooth and natural.
