I failed to mention that you have to go into Settings on the gmail app and turn on Keyboard Shortcuts
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?co=GENIE.Platform%3DiOS&hl=en
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Delighted
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Battery life
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Screen (size and clarity)
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Portability
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Many iOS apps mirror 70 -to- 90+ percent of their macOS equivalents (but, Office is a bit degraded for the Mac, esp. Excel, so 70+ percent of an already degraded system is only āOKā)
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EDIT: It is just a joy to use a basic text editor and my Logitech Bluetooth KB and type, in sheer bliss, in a coffee shop! ā¦ Did so recently and appreciated the extra focus it gave me. I tend to fiddle too much on my computer or phone.
Disappointed
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Needs PopClip! (Gosh I love that app!)
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Many tasks seem to take more steps on an iPad compared to laptop
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Selecting and acting on multiple items is so much easier on the Mac (example, selecting and acting on multiple to-do items in OmniFocus ā¦ file examples not quite here yet, as file-management is only cloud-based)
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I love Dropbox; but using it on the iPad causes me a LOT of trouble ā More than once, Iāve been quickly dragging through folders, to get to the one I want, and things will stop for a secondā¦ I know itās about to drag one folder into another one!! No!!! No way to stop it. ā¦ I know āI did it;ā but, did I? ā¦ All I did was have a moment where my finger caught a little more friction on the screenā¦
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File management not ārealā yet (external device support and seeing all file types with browse, rename, edit, round-trip edit, etc.)
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iCloud sync still not as fast as Dropbox and other services
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Apple-made keyboards limit one to only a few viewing angles and is too close to the iPad (I use a 3rd party case and a Logitech bluetooth keyboard and have a much lower viewing profile to limit āshoulder surfers,ā etc.)
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Photo management is SO much faster on the Mac
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Lack of mouse support ā iPad needs mouse support across the board to replicate the speed and ease of some computer-only tasks and efforts
Quick example of a āhead-to-head/live competitionā between an iPad and a laptop:
I was just working with a friend over dinner at a restaurant. She was helping me sort the madness that is planning travel with multiple cities on the āfar endā (āopen jawā or go to one city and return from another).
I brought my laptop and she brought her iPad.
I was initially envious because it was SO much more convenient for her on the iPad. The table was small and, in typical restaurant fashion, they wanted to provide good service and bring things rapidly.
I eventually had to close my laptop and give up. AFTER we were done eating though, her iPad did not work with all the travel sites, touch targets on destination dates and cities were causing her trouble, etc.
We had to go back to several sites via my laptop for them to even work.
I love my iPad, but this experience has made me nervous re: my pending trip, where I am attempting to go iPad-only!
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Perhaps this is a minor issue, but Iām still looking for a good iPad (or iPhone) app that can do an accurate OCR on a PDF file without hurting the quality of the image or vastly increasing the file size. Nuance Power PDF does such a better job that I keep going back to a ārealā PC laptop for that task.
-Jeff
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 canāt 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.
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My experience is with Scanbotās IAP OCR option (good, not great) and Prizmo (handles complex documents and boxed text well), but I donāt know about all the apps out there today. For what itās 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 theyāre 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 agree with this statement. Apps are also cheaper while it has almost or full-featured same as the desktop counterpart.
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Yes you are correct.
Iām 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 Iām iPad-only when Iām 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 Appleās recommended implementation of āOpen Inā¦ā.
- Presenting with Keynote, with my iPhone connected to a projector and an HDMI-dongle and then holding the iPad in āRemoteā mode, which allows me to scribble on the slide, use a pointer, and see the ānext slideā. 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 Iām on my 2013 MacBook Pro (though I wish it were as easy to detach as Appleās Smart Folio).
Sources of frustration
- File management, in general, but especially Appleās DISASTEROUS implementation of tags is. See my MPU Talk posting on what needs to be improved in tagging.
- 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 Appleās recommended implementation of āOpen Inā¦ā, forcing you either to use a proprietary parallel universe of file management or resort to āOpen a Copyā (Iām 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, itās usually because Iām anxious I wonāt be able to find files quickly.
Thanks. Iāve 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 shouldnāt be the case given the power of the iPad Pro.
-Jeff
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, itās 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.
A free option would be to upload to Google (privacy implications) and convert to a Google Doc/Drive, but Iāve never done that.
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. Itās maddening.
One thing PDFExpert does well is sync with Google Drive folders (it might sync with DropBox, too, but I havenāt checked that in a while).
Since Google Drive is how my students submit work, and itās also where I keep all PDFs of journal articles I want to read, that works really well for me.
But yeah, itād be much better if it would also use āOpen Inā¦ā
It does sync quite well with Dropbox.
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 doesnāt 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 doesnāt 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.
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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. Itās a hack, but itās helped me out. Hoping we get a more advanced windowing/split viewing system in iOS 13.
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Itās interesting that the amount of RAM isnāt 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.
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Iām pretty certain the extra 2GB make very little difference in the amount of RAM available to apps, itās there to manage the storage.
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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. Iāll count the number times that I swear due to iPad/iOS limitations and use that as a baseline for my āiPad as a laptop replacementā metric 
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In fact. Thatās why I had 3 email clients installed. But things are different now.
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