I’ve owned 2 iPads, a model 2 & and Air 2. My next one will be cellular.
I recently retired and said goodbye to my company Macbook Pro. I found some time ago that IOS is all I need for both my personal and my occasional consulting work. However, having to connect via my iPhone every time I am away from home is a pain, and there are times I really miss having GPS on my iPad.
I appreciate having a cellular iPad.
I pay $10 (CAD) a month to share my iPhone’s 6GB data plan with my iPad. Even though my iPad is often on Wi-Fi, it’s nice not to have to rely on having a Wi-Fi connection.
When I’m travelling outside of Canada I tend to piggyback off of my iPhone’s service, but I have bought SIM’s specifically for my iPad in the past…and it’s always nice to have the option.
It’s also worth noticing that, unlike the Wi-Fi model, only cellular iPads have a GPS. This is very helpful in some instances (e.g. when I’m flying with my Father and want to use my iPad for aerial navigation).
I have a wifi-only and oh, I wish I had a cellular one. Unfortunately the cost of the cellular plans is horrendous and it’s cheaper for me to hotspot my phone.
I also tether to the iPhone as a few others have stated. I figure I always have my iPhone or WI-FI so there’s no need for the sim enabled model for me.
I have a cellular ipad 2018. Obviously, I use it on wifi at home most of the time. But when I am travelling it is an entirely different story. To be able to buy a chip data sim somewhere in asia and get an internet connection everywhere is worh gold. Also, the wifi in hotels here is unreliable that I often prefer to switch to cellular anyway. Cellular option makes it a perfect travel device.
Do any of you just keep the hotspot turned on?
Mine is always on. That does not mean devices stay connected. Only that you can reattach from the wifi settings. Reattaching to a known, named Hotspot was the main thing I wanted to do with Workflows.app and it was never able to… Hoping for support in iOS 12.
So, on the other hand, it also means that your iPad does not constantly update apps and stuff if you keep it around your phone? I would like to minimize the steps to connect to my hotspot, but I‘m afraid of draining my mobile data if the iPad connects to the phone all day (when I‘m at work, where‘s no wifi).
first I’m anti- public wifi so having cellular on my ipad pro has been clutch
funny this topic is come up bc I’m trying to trim the fat on my budget and I was wondering if I could get by with tethering…(hate that it drains battery)… I’m going to try and tether more and see how that that feels
also felt like in the past maybe 2014’ish tethering wasn’t super mature or my connection kept dropping i’m sure/hoping its more stable now
I do like the tethering pairing from my macbook/mobile phone - stable and seamless
Correct, it does not do a lot of background stuff - which is the correct design decision IMO. Just that it currently takes way too many clicks to get it back up and running, including leaving the app you are currently working in.
Cellular is a must as we are in too many places with no WiFi available or it’s so slow so it’s unusable. With a week to go in our current month on Verizon, we’ve used 31gb of data. Currently in a campground that has a single DSL line for Internet that’s shared by many RVs. No way to use a WiFi only iPad.
The 2 iPads before this one were wifi only and using the hotspot to my phone was easy and seamless. However just after getting my 10.5 iPad, I lost my iPhone so had no connection while waiting for a new iPhone so as I was within the 14 days, I changed my iPad to cellular to have a back up. I have never regretted this and not having to connect to a hotspot means less friction using the iPad. I was going to use a different network to give me a second option but I have 100gb with EE and adding a data sim only was very cost effective, so I have used the same network.
If money were no object I’d have Cellular (and indeed my daughter does) but I don’t want the monthly outlay for something I’d rarely use.
I think that as a business proposition it is in Apple’s interest to bring down the cost of the cellular option, or even standardizing on it if costs go down sufficiently. Why? Because they discovered that one of their biggest, and growing, sales channels for the cellular Apple Watch is carriers who charge for cellular! Carrier stores might be the primary way around the world that people get to try out Apple Watches today, and the sales staff is motivated to sell it for the add-on cellular service.
This has worked well for the small, less expensive Sport watch, but I imagine that Apple could see a bump in iPad/Pro sales as well if they were more easily (and affordably) available at your local carrier store.
I think cellular is an important part of the Apple Watch story but not the whole thing and that kinda depends on the country.
My impression here is that most people don’t buy through the carrier and instead through big box or online for the iPad
Cellular for Watch is fraught. Here in the UK only one network even sells cellular access for Watch. Guess what? I’m on a different one.
But I did buy the cellular Watch 3 as it’s a better watch in other ways.