I recently purchased a brand-new iPP 10.5 256G on sale for $200 more than a 2018 iPad 9.7 128G. I tried the 2018 iPad 9.7 128G which was great, but the screen of the 10.5 side-by-side was slightly better, it was twice the storage, twice the RAM, and for $200 more seemed like a good deal. I also purchased an Apple Pencil, which I suspect won’t be used for much other than the very occasional signature or the rare need to mark up documents by hand. Still not sure whether I’m going to keep the Pencil.
My previous iPad was an iPad 3 LTE, which at one time I used quite a bit for work-related tasks through remote desktop (LogMeIn). I put up with the small screen and other inconveniences because it had a 10 hour battery life, could be charged from a reasonably-sized power bank, provided connectivity wherever I had an LTE signal, and was small enough that it was easy to carry and stow. I did have an inexpensive Bluetooth keyboard which worked well with it.
My main reason for buying a new iPad was the ability to have an ultra-portable computer which I could take around in the bag with my work laptop, so that I wasn’t tempted to do *any* personal work or browsing on my work laptop. I also have a 2008 MBP, which really needs replaced, but I didn’t want to lug around 2 laptops when traveling for work. So, I thought that perhaps the iPP could replace much of what I do on the MBP, while being small and light enough to be almost unnoticeable.
Well, the iPad may be able to do many of the things I did on the MBP, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t insanely frustrating. The problem isn’t what you *can’t* do on the iPad, the problem is that the workflow is so poor that even many of the things that you *can* do without issue are clunky or take 2-3 times longer than they would on a laptop. This isn’t a problem which will be solved with multiple doc support, file system access, external device support, or mouse support, although I think that all of those things in some form would help. For crying out loud, even something as simple as *printing* doesn’t work as well as it does on the desktop. I can edit docs in Word or Excel, but not with any degree of complexity; I don’t need full-featured apps, but the ones which exist are so stripped down that they can hardly be considered productivity apps.
I’ll provide some examples:
1 — Create a small, relatively simple PowerPoint presentation using elements from another presentation. I can’t have two presentations open at once—fine. I’ll copy all the slides with elements that I need from one presentation to the one I’m working on, which takes a small amount of extra time, but nothing too onerous. Once I get the slides into the new presentation, selecting, copying, and manipulating elements between the slides quickly drives me to the edge of insanity. There is no way to select multiple elements by dragging a selector tool, though I can select all (Cmd-A from the keyboard), but I can’t then un-select the few elements that I don’t want to copy. Once the elements (in this case, multiple parts of a diagram) are in the new slide, I can’t select just those elements to reposition on the slide—again, it’s Cmd-A for all or nothing. I would have been done with this slide in less than a minute on a laptop, but I’m now 10-15 minutes invested between opening different docs, trying to select only the elements I want to copy, copying them, then trying to select only those same elements to reposition, and still not getting everything exactly where I want it on the slide. This is simple, basic productivity stuff that you can’t do [well] on the iPad, and I don’t consider it to be an app limitation—it’s a limitation of the system.
2 — I posted a thread in the iOS Apps forum earlier today about the gymnastics involved in trying to print a Word doc with high-quality output. Again, not a problem from a laptop, but apparently impossible from an iPad.
3 — In web pages or even Tapatalk here, since there is no system cursor, it is impossible to resize a text window despite the fact that there is plenty of screen real estate. As a result, I’m forced to type in a relatively small window and can’t see the larger part of what I’ve typed. This becomes maddening after a while. Tapatalk is worse in that the text box is small and it won’t respond to most cursor keys (i.e. if you scroll up using the keyboard, the text in the box doesn’t scroll). Using forum text entry boxes in Safari, not only can I not resize them, but text selection doesn’t work properly, often jumping across paragraphs and forcing me to select multiple sentences when I really only want to select and delete one.
I outlined a use case above for how I was able to use an iPad 3 to enhance my productivity, but while laptops are now much lighter and have 10+ hour battery life, the iPad’s capabilities don’t appear to be much different today than they were back when I was using the iPad 3. That doesn’t even acknowledge the lost productivity and increased effort required to constantly raise your hand and arm from the keyboard to poke at various areas of the screen, whereas on a laptop everything can be done from the keyboard and nearby trackpad, while your arm or wrist remains comfortably resting.
I may still keep the iPad Pro 10.5 because it has a size and weight advantage, a small battery life advantage, and a charging advantage since I have power banks and lots of USB-A to Lightning cables. It works just fine for much of what I do, which is web-based, email, and light document editing. The large storage capacity will permit me to essentially carry a backup of my photos and important documents (though requiring apps like Documents to do so.) For me, it is significantly more versatile than an iPhone, simply because of the larger screen real estate. However, if I had to do all of my daily work activity on an iPad, I’d be less productive by multitudes.
