If you’ve been following me on this forum I posted about an iPad only (plus iPhone of course) setup and then recently bought a Mac I saw on offer.
Well, I decided to entertain myself during the lockdown to do another experiment. Using the iPhone XR 128GB as my only personal device for 30 days.
Many of the apps (not all) from the iPad are here. The screen is quite large. I have a raised stand, bluetooth keyboard and such to be able to type and have it at as ergonomic as possible and comfortable.
This comes as I contemplated selling my Mac (it’s nice, but sort of overkill for me) and buying another iPad only to wonder… is the iPad worth it plus iPhone? They’re always in sync and when I look back, holding the iPad in bed for reading was a little tricky after a few minutes. I found myself carrying the iPad everywhere but rarely being able to use it when out and about much.
There is nothing like Affinity’s apps on iPhone, I had them on iPad and Mac and would rarely use them since leaving my marketing role last year in personal life. I was impressed to see how LumaFusion works on iPhone too!
The iPhone can also do a lot of things such as tune into my work PC from around the house via RDP and monitor things and fire out the odd email (the novelty factor of this was amazing for the first few minutes!).
So, it’s not a long term solution. But it’ll teach me a few things: Am I going to miss the Mac to the extent after 30 days I say “lets never ever part again” and the notion is gone forever. OR, will it leave me feeling “An iPad will do me fine” or will it, and I doubt it, leave me saying “The iPhone is a fantastic device, it’s all I need in conjunction with my work PC
IF you guys think this doesn’t sound too ridiculous I’ll post regular updates to this thread as well as any discussion or tips you can give me. I hope I’m adding value to the forum with things like this.
After the “death’ of my old Mac mini I got along just fine for months using a WiFi only iPad and iPhone as my only devices. But I was not comfortable manually backing up to external drives. I eventually purchased a new mini to keep my archives, and new data from IOS, automatically backed up to B2.
I’m in a similar boat. I’ve been iOS only for about a year now, and my only real pain point is a concern over back ups. Pretty much all my data is on icloud, but there’s always a niggle of worry about losing data. I’ve often considered buying a mac and running time machine to backup to a local hard drive and backblaze or iMazing, but it seems like an expensive solution. I understand there are technical and security reasons to make it difficult, but a robust iOS only backup solution would be nice.
Please keep us updated! Would be interesting to learn about your experiences.
For me, the iOS and iPadOS lack the most in doing bigger batches of mostly manual tasks, such as organizing files and folders, or even the lack of intuitiveness when importing more than one file in some apps. Also, a clipboard manager would be great to have on iOS and iPadOS as well.
Definitely interested in updates. Regardless of apps, tasks, etc. I would hate being confined to the phone because the screen’s too small for reading quickly. iPhone plus books, though, could be promising!
One of the reasons larger smartphones took off (and left Apple scrambling to catch up in 2012-2014) is that inexpensive models quickly became the primary computer for tens, then hundreds of millions of people, making the larger screens more useful for normal tasks. Last year it was predicted that nearly three quarters of internet users will access the web solely via their smartphones by 2025. But this was already true in Africa and parts of Asia years ago, with people using their cellphones for mobile payments, for getting political, health, and consumer information and, of course, social networking.
This trend is continuing, which helps to explain the rumors of an even larger 6.7" iPhone coming out at the end of the year. (And if it comes that’s what I’ll be getting.)
It was, but I caught the mini on sale and that combined with 3% cash back from my credit card helped justify the purchase. As was having a full computer for those occasional jobs that are still difficult to accomplish on IOS.
That’s all true, but it’s still cramped. An iPhone 11 Pro’s page width in Books is about half the width of one page on an iPad, which page width is similar to a paperback’s.
