For me, I have below points to state about pros and cons of iPad as replacement of Mac/PC.
Pros:
It is portable, even 12.9 inch one is thinner and lighter than MacBook Pro.
Battery life is really good, even when I fly from Shanghai to NYC, it lasts long enough for entertainment include watch TV series and read books , even connect Wi-Fi on plane.
Lots of useful apps, they are cheaper on iPad, I really can’t afford the Mac version: just list some examples here:
Things 3
Luma Fusion
MindNode
sPlayer
Scanner Pro
1Password
Notability
Bear
All Apple Apps
Pencil is really good tool to replace mouse on iPad Pro, when I edit video, I use Apple Pencil rather than finger.
Cons:
I am a tech enthusiasm guy, that is to say, I like to try to use lots useful tools.
For example: wireshark, Pytcharm, Xcode, virtual machine to run linux, command line.
But swift playground is really nice app on iPad for people to learn code.
Whatever pros and cons iPad Pro has, I still love this machine, since besides very professional task I have to sit in front of my Mac, I spent most of my time with my iPad to get good use of it.
My experience is with Scanbot’s IAP OCR option (good, not great) and Prizmo (handles complex documents and boxed text well), but I don’t know about all the apps out there today. For what it’s worth I usually resort to Scanbot for short documents, then clean up the OCR manually.
Zapier always has good overviews. They did one on this subject last fall:
Wow. Thank you for telling me about this. I am baffled as to why they’re optional like that, but Gmail on iPad is much better now! Now they just need to support Split Views and my wishlist is complete.
I’m on a 2017 12.9 iPad Pro, using a Brydge keyboard. At home I use my iMac 5K for most everything, except reading PDFs, but 75% of the time I’m iPad-only when I’m working on campus.
Sources of delight
Using the Pencil to scribble comments to students and colleagues on PDFs, especially because I can pinch out for more space to write in the margin.
Apps like PDF Viewer that follow Apple’s recommended implementation of “Open In…”.
Presenting with Keynote, with my iPhone connected to a projector and an HDMI-dongle and then holding the iPad in “Remote” mode, which allows me to scribble on the slide, use a pointer, and see the “next slide”. So, so cool.
Screen quality while watching Learn.MacSparky.com videos!
The Brydge keyboard is a complete gamechanger for me. Really makes it feel like I’m on my 2013 MacBook Pro (though I wish it were as easy to detach as Apple’s Smart Folio).
So little control over what is available offline. Especially for Photos albums, this is a total pain, but also for Files. Getting a cellular iPad has alleviated this a great deal, but for people on WiFi-only, this is a huge hassle.
Apps that fail to follow Apple’s recommended implementation of “Open In…”, forcing you either to use a proprietary parallel universe of file management or resort to “Open a Copy” (I’m looking at you, PDF Expert!)
Better search. I would love to have something like HoudahSpot on the iPad. In fact, the days I bring my laptop to work instead of just the iPad, it’s usually because I’m anxious I won’t be able to find files quickly.
Thanks. I’ve tried those, and I used them when I need to, but I have yet to find something that works as well as a desktop app, which just shouldn’t be the case given the power of the iPad Pro.
ABBYY has a good reputation, and their online OCR service (which of course has privacy/security issues that might or might not concern you) is likely to be more powerful than any app-only solution. You can try it out for yourself: simply by registering before using the (free download) app you get 10 pages scanned per month. Unfortunately, it’s expensive for anything more than that - the only pay tier is $149/yr, which gets you 5,000 pages/year.
If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription I know you could do OCR via Acrobat on Mac/Windows, not sure how it works with iOS though.
Completely agree with this and your call-out to PDF Expert.
Yes! If iOS had comprehensive and robust search that allowed facet searching, complex queries and/or RegEx, across all file sources, apps, and everything else on device through spotlight and the search bar on Files, I would be thrilled. Finding, managing, and accessing files is one of the things I spend so much time doing, Right now, I can search for files that are in iCloud on Files. I have to go to the Dropbox app to search for files in Dropbox. I use FileBrowser or an SSH client to search for files on my network. It’s maddening.
One thing PDFExpert does well is sync with Google Drive folders (it might sync with DropBox, too, but I haven’t checked that in a while).
Since Google Drive is how my students submit work, and it’s also where I keep all PDFs of journal articles I want to read, that works really well for me.
But yeah, it’d be much better if it would also use “Open In…”
I have a 12.9 2018 and before then a 9.7 iPad pros.
They are just not fit for my work. iPad after all are just very big iPhones.
My work requires plenty of writing, planning, preparing speeches, concept notes. I need to refer to plenty of background material when doing my work and the maximum 2 windows metaphor just doesn’t cut it for me.
As an example for writing certain emails sometimes I need to refer to 3 or 4 other background emails and there is no way to do that as there is no concept of window. Working with the iPad would force me to curate the reference content [copy and paste it in a single document] before I can actually work - it doesn’t strike me as particularly efficient way of working.
And some workflows are still too fiddly, such as file keeping without creating duplicates all over the apps.
In short if I need to work on the move I carry my 2013 MBA 11". If I happen to need to be working on holidays, then that will happen on the iPad or iPhone with some complaints and moans.
Not taking away from your main point at all, but if you are in that specific email situation, you can use split view or a window overlay with Mail and another email app to look at email in one app while you compose in another app. It’s a hack, but it’s helped me out. Hoping we get a more advanced windowing/split viewing system in iOS 13.
It’s interesting that the amount of RAM isn’t really mentioned in our retrospectives. I actually had forgotten that I had the smaller 4GB until I saw a recommended thread here. I take this as an indicator that the 1TB should only be bought if you need the storage; 6GB is not at all needed to do a full amount of work on the iPad Pro.
I have several trips coming up in April and June, two of which will involve a fair bit of travel by air. While I will be brining my MacBook, my goal is to not use it at all during any of these trips. I’ll count the number times that I swear due to iPad/iOS limitations and use that as a baseline for my “iPad as a laptop replacement” metric
Wow! Using Shortcuts for your lesson plans! I’m impressed!
Several years ago, the state of Illinois totally overhauled the elementary curriculum and fundamentally bullied their way into every classroom. I took one look at the mess they came up with (expletives deleted) and thought it would be next to impossible to manage during the school year.
So I spent much of my summer off writing a database with pull-down menus, radio buttons etc. and other fancy stuff. (I loved FileMaker Pro.) I was sure glad I did! I referred to my lesson plans as my “creative writing” anyway.
I wish I could find an app like that for the iPad .
Where in Spain are you teaching? I supervised Spaniards teaching English one year.
“Lesson plans” were very…loosely planned. More like lists of conversation topics, games to play, that kind of thing. So not the kind of fully-fledged lesson planning a real teacher might do, for sure. But because of that a lot of the activities I did could be reused with other classes, so I had a series of shortcuts and Evernote items that helped me keep track of what activities I’d done with which groups, and helped me plan for the week ahead. It worked reasonably well.
I’m back in Australia now (have been for a year or two) but I was in La Rioja, in a tiny little town called Santo Domingo de la Calzada. It was fabulous and we really miss it - but we did fortunately avoid the pandemic and have just had a baby boy back here at home, so it has all worked out well. Hopefully we can take him back someday - we love it there.
Oh sounds like you had the essence of those plans. The rest of it is busywork especially if you’ve taught for a couple of years. Professional “educators” keep trying to reinvent the wheel.
I had a number of majors in college. Education was so uninspired, dull. It’s all been done before.
Maybe you’ll get to go back there to España some day!
