iPad Pro as My Daily Work Machine– My Experience

The form factor of the iPad is one that I have loved from the beginning. Back in April of 2010, when the first iPad was announced and released, there was a two-month delay before it would be released in Canada. That did not stop me however as I managed to snap one up off eBay at a reasonable price and it was in my hands a week after the US release date.

The iPad is a fantastic option as a consumption device for what I consider more long-form entertainment that would just be too cramped on a phone. Watching a movie on a plane, on your phone? That just seems crazy to me. The iPad checked a lot of boxes my iPhone did not. It was and still is, a preferred way to read comic books and digital magazine content. For me, it has always been the consumption king. There have been thousands of other tablet options that have hit the market, but the iPad was always my jam, especially since I preferred the iOS ecosystem.

I purchased my first iPad Pro back in 2018 with the release of the beautiful new redesign. The USB-C compatibility was the first in many game-changing features that the new high-end model would deliver. The removal of the home button and switch to a design like that of the iPhone X redesign just made the entire package a sexy beast.

It was still a consumption device though, at least for me. I do not have an artistic bone in my body so using it to draw pretty pictures was something I was never going to be able to do.

Fast forward to the year 2020. The global pandemic hit, and I was shifted to working from home, which made me rethink my entire office setup. My primary computer for work was a Surface Pro, which served me perfectly well for logging into my office computer but was used for little else. Right beside it, I had my 2018 iPad Pro 11” with a Keyboard Cover Folio and a mouse that I used occasionally. At this point, the mouse support was part of the Accessibility settings. It was a notable feature but felt undercooked. Many were under the impression that it was a beta test for a more robust release later – and they would be right.

In March of 2020, Apple released iPad OS 13.4 and, with it came mouse and touchpad support as a full-fledged feature. No longer buried in Accessibility settings, and accompanied by the new Magic Keyboard, this was a game-changer. Now I did not have any real interest in the Magic Keyboard, my Keyboard Folio suited me fine, but I immediately bought a separate mouse for my iPad Pro and that is when everything changed… at least for a while.

I found myself using my iPad Pro a lot more. A LOT more. It had evolved from a mere consumption device, and I began using Microsoft Office apps on it. Soon enough I figured out a way to configure my iPad with a VPN and terminal server software so I could log into my work computer, and I was in a roll. My iPad Pro could do everything my Surface Pro could do. Well, at least for work, but that was enough to leave my Surface Pro collecting dust.

There were some caveats. The Office Apps were not as fully featured as their desktop counterparts. They did enough to get the job done though and for everything else I had access to a full-fledged version of Windows via remote desktop to my work computer. That work access may have skewed my results at the time. More on that later.

I was convinced that the iPad Pro was the 2-in-1 solution for me. It is something that I had hoped the Surface Pro would achieve but it failed miserably as a tablet for consumption. The apps were not designed around a hybrid experience. The iPad Pro was filling the role enough that I decided to sell my Surface Pro. I was all in on the iPad Pro, baby!

The thing is, I was not alone. There were, and still are, plenty of people talking about and expressing their joy about using the iPad Pro as their all-in-one work/consumption machine. I followed people on YouTube and Twitter who would rave about their ability to use their iPad Pro as their work computer, a central hub for their studio, and as a nice cozy book to curl up with at night in their bed.

The reality was that a lot of the people I was following were involved in careers that took advantage of the iPad Pro’s strengths as a work machine. They were in graphic design, web design, or video editing. The iPad has a strong suite of tools to facilitate anyone working in those fields.

While I did not work in any of those fields, the iPad Pro did just enough to work for me. Sure, it is a video output option that left bars on the left and right side of my external display was frustrating as hell, but I managed to not let it bother me. Surely, Apple would see how people are using this machine and would eventually get around to fixing problems like full-screen external display?

It was around May and June of 2021 when my frustrations began mounting. The announcement and release of the iPad Pro 2021 model was a mixed bag. Apple announced an incredibly powerful machine that boasted the M1 chip, which had been previously released in several of their laptop and desktop machines in late 2020. More exciting, at least for me, was the inclusion of 8GBs and 16GBs of RAM in their models. If they were including 16GBs of RAM in their 1TB and 2TB configurations they had to have big plans for iPad OS 15, right?

The discussion around the disappointment that was iPad OS 15, at least for iPad Pro users, has been around for some time so I will not go in-depth here. While many wanted Pro apps like Final Cut Pro or a full desktop version of Photoshop, I would have just been happy with full-screen external support at the system level. Some wanted Apple to port the entirety of MacOS over to the iPad Pro. That was never happening.

I had bought an iPad Pro 2021 regardless of the announcements at WWDC. It was my all-in-one, and the RAM alone would be a worthy upgrade. Using Safari with all that extra RAM saw a dramatic difference. I had settled on an 8GB configuration. I could not imagine what benefit a 16GB configuration would have given me. How many tabs and apps do I need to open without the need to refresh at one time?

So, what happened?

Well, at the end of September 2021 I left my job and lost my, access to a remote desktop. I planned to spend the next year writing and pursuing other “side-hustles” to see if I could turn a few of them into a livable income. That is a topic for another day but with the projects I had in mind, I was sure the iPad was sufficient to make it work.

Then I started using the Medium app.

I have seen a lot of people rave about the Medium app but I found it a chore to use. Its interface is not very intuitive and simple things like copying and pasting from iPad OS Word became a pain as the text would lose its formatting in the process. It was disappointing but I thought I could at least use the website to get my work done but that was not in the cards either. The website would constantly find ways to push me to the Medium app, which I found borderline unusable. Simple projects became complicated. I was not even able to properly add images to my articles. It was a frustrating experience.

There were other things too. The benefit of having access to a remote desktop shielded me from how the iPad Pro just was not there as a 2-in-1 computer. It is a good option but falls short where it counts. Along with no full-screen external monitor support, I would say the most glaring issue with the iPad OS interface is file management. The files app is so far behind desktop-style functionality that it feels like it is fighting against the user. In the years since its inclusion, it has seen little in the way of upgrades.

Fighting against the baked-in user experience of iPad OS was finally starting to affect my work. It made me not want to sit down and write or get any other work done. That was not an option, so I decided to sell my iPad Pro 2021 and my love affair with that sexy beast from 2018 was at an end.

My new jam is a Surface Pro 8 and I am loving it. It is still not the 2-in-1 dream machine that I want, but it is closer than my last experience. I have been playing around with Android app functionality and was able to use Comixology for my comic book reading and it was a marked improvement in the tablet department. Microsoft has a long way to go as they try to cut out their share of that 2-in-1 market but from the opposite end of the spectrum. Anyone who has used these machines knows that the iPad is a tablet first while the Surface is a laptop first.

I still needed a full-fledged tablet in my life, so I also picked up an iPad Mini 6. This little machine’s design mirrors that of the iPad Pro model so it should come as no surprise that I am more than happy with my purchase.

I do not feel like my decision to go all-in on the iPad Pro was a mistake. I think for most people it would be perfectly fine as their daily computer and I would still recommend it as such based on what they would be using it for. Unfortunately, for my evolving use case scenarios it stopped meeting my standards so I had to make a very costly change to something that will achieve all my working goals.

I could see myself revisiting the iPad Pro in a few years once it has had more time to bake in the oven. It feels so close to being perfect, but Apple does not seem ready to make it a viable laptop option. They want you to dress it up to look like one clad in the pricey Magic Keyboard but deep down it is still just a pretender.