Went iPad Pro for a few weeks and here is what I learned...

By jancifra11. January 2018In Personal

Went iPad Pro for a few weeks and here is what I learned…

Intro

A few weeks ago I decided to make a 10.5” iPad Pro my main computer for a while. My 15” 2017 MacBook Pro had to go in for repairs and I was going on vacation. I had the option of depending on just my iPhone X for 3 weeks, getting a MacBook Air loaner or taking the plunge into tablet land. I owned a couple of iPads before and I like them as products. However I never used one as my primary device.

Granted – I did not expect to do a lot of work on it – being on vacation and all. But I did want to blog, edit pictures I took, keep up with email, review some spreadsheets and presentations and participate on a call or two. This and normal operations (banking, research, reading etc…) were the activities I expected the iPad should be able to do at a reasonable level. So I got myself a new iPad Pro, got the Apple Smart Cover with keyboard and an Apple pencil and handed my MacBook Pro in for repairs.

Device itself

The 10.5” iPad Pro is fantastic device. It’s super light, has an amazing screen, great camera and plenty of storage options to choose from. I am a heavy iCloud user, but I still went for a 256GB version. I planned on loading up a lot of movies and TV shows for my family on it to have something decent to watch on the long flights. For a detailed review – go read a review somewhere. The thing I wanted to focus on is – how do you use an iPad as a primary device? For me the condition was a keyboard. Yes, I can type on the touchscreen just fine, but it is not just the typing that concerned me. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts on my Mac and did not want to change my habbits.

Smart Cover & Apple Pencil

Fortunately the Smart Cover keyboard works fine with many of them (Cmd+Tab for app switching, Cmd+Space for Spotlight search,….). This made me pretty productive and felt really good. The typing is also faster. The Apple Pencil I bought did not get a lot of usage from me. It works very well – I barely ever write by hand. The way it ignores my hand while writing with the pencil is magical. I understand why people use it for graphics and stuff but for me the purchase was useless. My image editing skills do not go beyond the very basics.

All in all there was just one hiccup with this setup. The Smart Cover keyboard is not fixed on to the iPad as a laptop keyboard is. So initially I had trouble using it when sitting on a sofa or beach chair and putting it on my lap. It tended to fall forward and wasn’t very stable. Fortunately I found a simple hack for this. I used one of my daughters books to put the iPad with the Smart Cover on and that provided enough stability for it to work just fine. I would prefer a keyboard cover that would be stronger and more fixed so that I would not need the book, but I haven’t seen anything on the market that would work like that.

iOS 11

The latest version of Apple’s mobile OS has focused significantly on the tablet experience. The leap from 10 to 11 on the iPhone is not nearly as big as on an iPad. Again I don’t want to do a full review so I’ll just focus on the things that were important to my experience.

Split Screen

iOS 11 allows you to split your screen between apps or float one app in a small window over another fullscreen app. This is important on a primary device as you might be for example reading feedback to a document in an email while having the document open. This feature requires some getting used to and setting it up is not very straightforward. You have to open the app switcher, drag one app icon on to the other app window and then either drop it on top for a floating experience or on the side for splitscreen.

The number of times I messed it up made me almost give up on it, but now finally I am pretty comfortable with it. The other snag I hit was the fact that a lot of apps have not been updated for it. This led to me trying to splitscreen an app with another one only to fail all the time and think that I am doing something wrong. Once I realised that apps have to support it – I no longer experienced that much frustration. Also the resizing of the split screen works very well and was unexpectedly useful.

File drag and drop

If you are a knowledge worker you drag and drop a lot. No, not you terminal freaks – us normal people. With iOS11 Apple added the ability to drag and drop files between apps in split screen or floating mode. One of the usecases I experience often is processing attached files from my email in other apps. I was looking forward to this feature. Unfortunately, it never really worked well for me.

It’s fine with Apple’s own file types and apps like Keynote, Numbers, Photos or Pages. But a lot of third party apps and fileformats are not yet supported. Hence I often had to save files to iCloud or the iPad and open them from the apps separately. Another issue was that when dragging files to varios storage apps (iCloud, Nextcloud, Owncloud, Google Drive), each app behaved differently. With some you could choose were specifically you wanted to save the file. In others it would just drop the file in a default place and you had to move it later. Until more app developers add it to their apps the feature will not be very useful.

VPN

For the record I did not manage to get my VPN connection working. It has more to do with the way our server is set up but remember that setting up a VPN up on an iOS device may take extra effort.

Apps

Most of my apps worked fine on the iPad. Obviously there are limitations. For one I was not able to be as fast with many of them as I am on my Mac. Part of it is the fact that I am used to the Mac interface for sophisticated use-cases but a bigger part is that the apps have not the full feature sets as their Mac counterparts. A good example are my rules that I have set up in Airmail on my Mac. The iOS app does not have the feature and as my Mac is offline for repair I had to manually process a lot of email that normally is taken care of by rules.

Another thing is that the user interfaces are not built for heavy use. Multiple email selection did not work as expected for me where I would hold down the shift key on the keyboard and selected email with my finger. Instead I had to go into a multiple selection mode and do the selection there and then choose the activity (like move, label,…) that I wanted to do with them. This took time and was sometimes pretty frustrating.

The productivity apps like Numbers, Keynote and Pages are another matter. The apps are clearly not yet ready for heavy editing of documents and are mainly meant for review or small edits. An example I found was the fact that I couldn’t duplicate a Keynote file (a report) that I wanted to rework for the next period. This was mind-boggling and I find either a massive omission or me not being able to find how to do it.

So how was it overall?

Using the iPad as my primary device was an interesting experience. There are many things that weren’t perfect. But the maturity of iOS and the Smart Cover keyboard make it possible for me to be at least 80% productive. I had to re-learn some things and it was frustrating at times, but I managed to get through it. The mobility of an iPad, it’s compact size and almost no weight make it a powerful device on the go especially compared to myMacBook Pro. I am still looking forward to getting the Mac back. But the iPad has proven to be a good enough replacement for shorter periods of time.

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The apps I use for most of my productivity: