iPad Pro What Can't you do on your iPad Pro ?

[jeremiah256]

Strangely enough, I'm having an "iPad can't do it, but iPhone can" issue. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, and if so, would love some help.

On my iPhone, if I want to save an email as a PDF to my cloud storage or app, I click the 'Reply/Forward/Print' arrow, select 'Print', Force Touch the email to automatically turn it into a PDF, then I use the Share button to save it. When I try to do the same on my iPad, I don't get this option.

Similar issue with webpages. On the iPhone I select Share - print - Force Touch - save, but again, this is not an option on my iPad.

 

[Newtons Apple]

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It's interesting how those that tend to brag about how big their company files are and all the robust programs they use at work are able to log onto an iPad forum during work hours. Makes me doubt their claims.

When you own the company you may do as you wish, to a point. Not trying to convince anyone of my claims.

At least I am working.

 

[arkitect]

I don't get your "genuine spreadsheet" comment. I have a Numbers financial planing spreadsheet that I wrote. This is a genuine spreadsheet with graphs, and tables (of course, duh?) embedded. It works great on iPhone, iPad, Mac and even the iCloud version. it is a 50-year solver that target various financial paths depending upon investment earnings, taxes, inflation rates, etc., etc, etc. works great.

Thanks… I'll try harder.

******************************

I think for me, personally, IMHO, Not an attack on your beloved iPad, even if it were capable of running the apps I listed I would still find the screen size inadequate. Just as I find a 13" MacBook inadequate.

For the kind of work I do a large screen is definitely needed. What is so hard to understand about that?

Not all of us are sprightly 20 year olds with 20:20 vision.
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When you own the company you may do as you wish, to a point. Not trying to convince anyone of my claims.

At least I am working.

Exactly.
And also, different time zones and all.

 

[Newtons Apple]

http://www.123dapp.com/design


Not available yet, but so amazing: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ipad/
http://www.pixelmator.com/ios/


https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quickbooks-accounting-invoice-estimate-expense/id584606479?mt=8


done automatically through the cloud, no need to plug into computer for backups

Come at me bro!

You lost me on the first one. I can tell you do not do AutoCAD if you think you can "make do" with your suggestion. I was right about you not knowing what you are talking about.

 

[sjleworthy]

the 'cant do' list is infinitely longer than the 'can do list' i suspect

for me, i cant even dream of anything visual, ie, 3d graphics/animation, in a professional capacity on an ipad.

 

[M. Gustave]

Not a "can't do" but yesterday I needed to search through 3 years of emails to find a particular one. That was easier to do on a large screen PC

Mail, Spark, Gmail, etc all have a search function in iOS. Are you scrolling through them manually??

 

[martint235]

Mail, Spark, Gmail, etc all have a search function in iOS. Are you scrolling through them manually??

Pretty much. I'm not sure how intelligent search has become but I knew what I wanted but not the detail. If a search for "all emails about buying a bike" would work I could have used the search, as it was I just went through folders looking for emails at around the right date

 

[M. Gustave]

Pretty much. I'm not sure how intelligent search has become but I knew what I wanted but not the detail. If a search for "all emails about buying a bike" would work I could have used the search, as it was I just went through folders looking for emails at around the right date

I use Google Inbox, but I'm pretty sure any current mail app, including the stock Mail, will also search by keyword through everything: title, content, and contacts.

I think the idea of folders for email is pretty dated.

 

[martint235]

I use Google Inbox, but I'm pretty sure any current mail app, including the stock Mail, will also search by keyword through everything: title, content, and contacts.

I think the idea of folders for email is pretty dated.

Where do you store email that you'll need in the future? The email I wanted was 3 years old, I'd hate to have 3 years of mail in my inbox (in fact I get twitchy if I can't see all my inbox on one screen of my iphone!! I'm the same at work, my inbox is less than the size of my laptop screen)

 

[M. Gustave]

Where do you store email that you'll need in the future? The email I wanted was 3 years old, I'd hate to have 3 years of mail in my inbox (in fact I get twitchy if I can't see all my inbox on one screen of my iphone!! I'm the same at work, my inbox is less than the size of my laptop screen)

I don't actually delete a single email. So anything not in the inbox is "archived", which is essentially just flagged as done. This is the whole basis of Gmail.

I extract the tasks or calendar events from each piece of mail, then archive it. To find old mail, search is far more efficient than scrolling through folders manually.

 

[thatisme]

What you can't do is use a mouse or trackpad alongside the smart keyboard to use as a pointing device. Using spreadsheets without a pointing device is simply inefficient, and using the finger or pen to touch the screen doesn't take place of a trackpad or mouse pointer.

Beyond that, there are many educational sites used by colleges that will not run through Safari on the iPad. I know that's not necessarily the iPads fault vs. the websites should be rebuilt using HTML5, but it exists and it is a limitation.

Saving attachments and programs from the web have always been an issue.

Until these are resolved, the laptop / PC / Mac will have a place

 

[M. Gustave]

What you can't do is use a mouse or trackpad alongside the smart keyboard to use as a pointing device. Using spreadsheets without a pointing device is simply inefficient, and using the finger or pen to touch the screen doesn't take place of a trackpad or mouse pointer.

Beyond that, there are many educational sites used by colleges that will not run through Safari on the iPad. I know that's not necessarily the iPads fault vs. the websites should be rebuilt using HTML5, but it exists and it is a limitation.

Saving attachments and programs from the web have always been an issue.

Until these are resolved, the laptop / PC / Mac will have a place

I don't think it's ever been a question of ridding the earth of desktops & laptops. Choose the right machine for your tasks.

More to your specific points, the keyboard forces the iPad into a laptop configuration, at which it does not excel (except for long stretches of typing). Remove the keyboard, and I find that Excel for iOS is very efficient with touch input.

 

[Hym tix]

That is available today. I use Sandisk Connect but there are plenty others such as Kingston Mobilite, RAVPower Filehub etc.

Discovering this is what took me from despising Apple for selling devices with 16GB capacity to not really caring anymore.

I use a HooToo Nano for a mobile file server with the FileBrowser app.

 

[Booch21]

I truly only fire up the iMac when I am doing my audio or video editing with Audition or Premiere Pro. Most everything else I can manage on the iPad Pro.

 

[dukeblue219]

I could do a lot of office work on an iPad, but it's so much slower than with full-sized keyboard and mouse. I don't know if other people are just that much faster at typing on the iPad's screen (or bluetooth kb) than I am but it's not remotely close. I can also navigate with the mouse far faster than with the touch interface -- for example, moving from cell to cell in a spreadsheet, or selecting text in a document.

There's also plenty of websites that just don't work right on a tablet yet, particularly when they have various frames embedded and you need to scroll within them, or you have a complex (and probably poorly programmed) web app.

For other generic work, like doing my taxes or budgeting, I need to be able to reference multiple windows at the same time and quick copy and paste from one app to another. I understand that it can be done on an iPad, but I can't do it at even half the speed as on a desktop computer (or laptop hooked to a dock).

 

[Jnesbitt82]

That is available today. I use Sandisk Connect but there are plenty others such as Kingston Mobilite, RAVPower Filehub etc.

Can you send data both ways or stream from only?

 

[dukeblue219]

You lost me on the first one. I can tell you do not do AutoCAD if you think you can "make do" with your suggestion. I was right about you not knowing what you are talking about.

Yep.

Most of the big design suites have free or mobile-capable competitors, but it's not the same thing. It's like when people suggest LibreOffice instead of MS Office on the desktop, or Numbers instead of Excel on mobile. They work fine if you want to list your monthly budget in a spreadsheet. They don't substitute if you need to open a large spreadsheet from work, edit macros, and save with certainty that it will work when your boss opens it the next day at a design review.

"Oh, I designed that widget with 123D Design and documented its measurements in this Excel sheet generated by Numbers." That'll go over well at work and your co-workers will remember your firing for years to come.

 

[Phil A.]

I love my iPad Pro but there's no way on earth it could replace my computers. For me, a typical day involves running the following:

VMWare Fusion
oXygen XML
Xcode
Netbeans
Visual Paradigm

None of these have any alternative that will work on the iPad and even in my down time it can't do basics such as smart albums in Photos (which is beyond annoying!)

What I love using it for is writing documents and taking notes with OneNote and with the Citrix mouse and Jump Desktop, it makes a great Remote Desktop client for customer support

Strangely enough, I'm having an "iPad can't do it, but iPhone can" issue. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, and if so, would love some help.

On my iPhone, if I want to save an email as a PDF to my cloud storage or app, I click the 'Reply/Forward/Print' arrow, select 'Print', Force Touch the email to automatically turn it into a PDF, then I use the Share button to save it. When I try to do the same on my iPad, I don't get this option.

Similar issue with webpages. On the iPhone I select Share - print - Force Touch - save, but again, this is not an option on my iPad.

You can certainly do that on an iPad (or any iOS device without force touch), but it's not exactly intuitive!
What you do is pinch outwards with two fingers on the preview at the bottom of the print window (so start with your finger and thumb together in the middle of the preview and spread outwards).

It then switches to the same PDF window you get by force touching and you can do what you want with the PDF file

 

[M. Gustave]

Yep.

Most of the big design suites have free or mobile-capable competitors, but it's not the same thing. It's like when people suggest LibreOffice instead of MS Office on the desktop, or Numbers instead of Excel on mobile. They work fine if you want to list your monthly budget in a spreadsheet. They don't substitute if you need to open a large spreadsheet from work, edit macros, and save with certainty that it will work when your boss opens it the next day at a design review.

"Oh, I designed that widget with 123D Design and documented its measurements in this Excel sheet generated by Numbers." That'll go over well at work and your co-workers will remember your firing for years to come.

a) MS Office is available in iOS. It has about 95% of the full functionality, and 100% of the compatibility of the desktop version.

b) No one is advocating or selling the iPP as an enterprise business machine. It's also not a dev box. Kind of like complaining that your 2-door coupe can't tow 10000 lbs. Duh.
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I love my iPad Pro but there's no way on earth it could replace my computers. For me, a typical day involves running the following:

VMWare Fusion
oXygen XML
Xcode
Netbeans
Visual Paradigm

None of these have any alternative that will work on the iPad...

So?

 

[Phil A.]

So?

The title of the thread is "what can't you do on you iPad Pro" - a question I answered with my response.

I don't see an issue with examining the limitations of a device (particularly in a thread created for that purpose): it doesn't mean I like mine any less or use it for what it's good for any less, but the fact remains there is a list of things I need that I doubt the iPad Pro will ever do simply because it's not what it's designed to do.

I much prefer this approach of focussed devices that excel at what they're designed for than the approach Microsoft take of trying to combine a laptop and a tablet and doing neither that well

 

[M. Gustave]

The title of the thread is "what can't you do on you iPad Pro" - a question I answered with my response. I don't see an issue with examining the limitations of a device (particularly in a thread created for that purpose): it doesn't mean I like mine any less or use it for what it's good for any less, but the fact remains there is a list of things I need that I doubt the iPad Pro will ever do simply because it's not what it's designed to do. I much prefer this approach of focussed devices that excel at what they're designed for than the approach Microsoft take of trying to combine a laptop and a tablet and doing neither that well

I think the fact that an iPad isn't a pc, and can't do most dev work, has been done to death here. It adds nothing to rehash it. Sorry.

 

[Newtons Apple]

Yep.

Most of the big design suites have free or mobile-capable competitors, but it's not the same thing. It's like when people suggest LibreOffice instead of MS Office on the desktop, or Numbers instead of Excel on mobile. They work fine if you want to list your monthly budget in a spreadsheet. They don't substitute if you need to open a large spreadsheet from work, edit macros, and save with certainty that it will work when your boss opens it the next day at a design review.

"Oh, I designed that widget with 123D Design and documented its measurements in this Excel sheet generated by Numbers." That'll go over well at work and your co-workers will remember your firing for years to come.

Thanks Sir.

Nothing I would like better to find out my iPad could replace my laptop and desktop but then I wake up and face reality and know we are not near that yet. Maybe one day, we can dream. For those who say we no longer need a desktop, they do not understand. I do not expect them to understand.

 

[M. Gustave]

Nothing I would like better to find out my iPad could replace my laptop and desktop...

Why?

 

[oliversyl]

I would love to be able to use the iPad Pro for my photography workflow. Although you can import raw image files on it, you can only edit them as raw from a Mac in Photos. Right now, when you import raw pictures on an iPad you get to edit the embedded JPG file inside it, instead of the file itself. That should be something fairly simple for Apple to implement. Without it, I'm stuck with Lightroom and my MacBook.

 

[subjonas]

For me, iPad Pro can't:
- (obviously) run specific work programs only available on desktop OS. Some of these programs could feasibly be brought to iOS; but some already push the hardware limits of the MacOS machines, so I don't see them ever coming to iOS without taking a huge step back in power, particularly in graphics processing.
- run Time Machine. Maybe at some point a version of TM will come to iOS, but it will only be useful to me if it allows for as much storage as I want to buy, and doesn't require a subscription--ie. it backs up to a wireless hard drive via wifi network.
- do work requiring screens larger than 13" or multiple screens. I think it's possible Apple may someday push iOS to run on even bigger iPads, possibly up to 15"; and maybe even run on multiple screens.

For anyone arguing that iPads/iOS can eventually completely replace Macs for everyone (and I don't think I've seen too many arguing this), I think there are underlying reasons against this. Every device has to strike a balance between power and mobility (even desktop computers can't be outrageously huge). MacOS devices and their ecosystems strike a balance generally prioritizing power first, mobility second. iOS devices and their ecosystems strike a balance generally prioritizing mobility first, power second. Each have their own range of devices that strike subtly different balances, but the underlying priorities are set for each. It goes back to SJ's analogy. One OS is not better than the other, just as a truck is not better than a car or vice versa. A car can't haul a ton of rocks. A truck can't get 40mpg. In the world there is a vast landscape of different needs. Some people want to argue about which category the vast majority resides in. Of course they are free to do so. I don't see the point personally since it will never be proven with arguments or anecdotes. Wherever the money leads, the market will follow. Unless we have access to huge amounts of data, that's the only way any of us MR readers will know. All I'll say is, I'm not worried about losing Macs until the day Apple can run Apple solely on iOS.