I know, that’s why I still own an iPad Pro, even though I know I’ll be disappointed with the OS every single year
That’s why I set up a Mac Mini in MacStadium and use TeamViewer to overcome all the shortcomings of the iPad Pro whilst out and about.
One swipe to the TeamViewer app on iPad and I have a full Mac experience at great speed at my fingertips. Combined with Synology Drive integration even file management works between the iPad Pro, M1 MacMini at home and the other one at MacStadium. If only I had decent internet speeds at home I could forego the MacStadium (1GB up/down) solution, but we are unlikely to see FTTH here anytime soon.
This setup now works for me so well that I have no more real use for my full spec MBP 16" and consider selling it as I haven’t touched it in over 2 months.
I do regular backups because my files are important to me. I have photos that I don’t want to lose, so I sync them to iCloud, and back them up to Backblaze B2 and Amazon. iCloud is a sync service, not a backup. If I accidentally delete a photo, it is deleted from iCloud. And if iCloud glitches and loses one of my photos, it is deleted from all my devices.
Some time ago I had the central unit (heating/cooling) replaced at my mother’s house, and a few years later it failed. My brother was handling the repair and asked me to send him a copy of the warranty. I had scanned it and stored it on my computer, but it was gone. Fortunately, I was able to search for it in Arqbackup and recovery a copy from a backup I had made more than a year in the past.
I backup because I can’t know for sure that all the data that I have stored on my devices is actually still there, until the next time I look for it.
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That’s it, in a nutshell. If your OS has a problem that torches any of your files, iCloud likely won’t save you.
The recent DEVONthink database corruption issue is a fantastic example. Some data just disappeared, iCloud or not. And once it disappeared, the missing data was gone everywhere.
How much of your data are you okay with that happening to? 
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An interesting article
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Works fine, why back up anything?
Well, I hope you never find out the answer to that question.
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Pondering the RAM issue: My speculations are along the lines that Apple is planning to make more RAM available to apps but cannot (will not) do so until they’re ready to break app compatibility with older iPad Pros.
The RAM limit is already different on different iPad models. The previous 2020 iPad Pro has a limit of 4.5GB. The 2021 has 5GB. The 2018 iPad Pro has 3GB I think. So relaxing RAM limit on 2021 iPad Pros won’t break anything.
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Hughes says “One potential explanation for why Apple put the M1 in the iPad might simply be chip consolidation.” That would be my guess. And the extra sales the M1 brings in from the “don’t need it but gotta have it” crowd is just gravy.
And “Those who need to use dual monitors, record a podcast, or edit 4K video with surround sound audio should get a Mac.” Again, the only smart move until the software and/or features you need on an iPad are actually being delivered to customers, IMO.
These articles are why Mac based forums have all but died.
Tech knowledge is kind of like Pornography ….you kinda know it when you see it.
The same people that feel like all computing problems go away if you just throw more MHz
At a solution are the same who think that throwing RAM also fixes all issues.
I’m happy there are 16GB versions of the iPad. Tablet hardware cannot be upgraded easily internally. There is always a benefit to more RAM for a computing system because even if applications are still bound by limits you still get to the advantage of having more RAM in total in service of more apps.
There remains a lot of low-hanging fruit that the company could have tackled — features already widely available on both Intel and M1 Macs, including a more robust multitasking system, proper support for external monitors, and greater compatibility with external peripherals.
Multitasking - All computers multitask. What is robust multitasking? How will it benefit users?
Monitor Support - What percentage of iPad users are connecting an external display?
External Peripherals - Um Thunderbolt.
Personally I get more value from MPU because custom workflows are unique and don’t following typical hardware engineering path where things tend to follow more predictable roadmaps.
You can benefit from 16GB now, even with the 5GB-per-app limitation. 16GB lets you keep open two beefy apps/large files, plus a bunch of the usual miscellaneous apps, running when 8GB would have to kill one of them. I don’t think anyone but serious digital artists, videographers or gamers would do this right now; coincidentally, they’re the same ones who might actually find it worthwhile to pay for 1TB-2TB storage.
Agree that when the 4GB models roll off, more developers will be willing to design their apps around higher availability of memory.
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Robust multitasking is not having to fish for an app so as to find it. It’s thinking of it and immediately calling on it. Stackable windows provide this.
Monitor Support - What percentage of iPad users are connecting an external display?
The question should be worded in reverse: what percentage of iPad users would connect to an external display if that support was better? Because at the moment, despite having had a dual screen computer setup for literally ages now, I see no point of hooking my iPad to an external screen. Because that support does not provide value that I can see.
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No one is saying 16GB is not useful. It’s just that it’s very limited compared to what could have been possible. There’s no reason I can think of to limit per app RAM to 5GB. The professional artists are expecting to use these RAM to do more layers in Procreate and Affinity. That’s always been the case when RAM is upgraded but not this time.
I have guesses, but don’t know why exactly they do that. These kinds of limits aren’t new. Here’s a good list of reported per-app ceilings by device going back several years. The limit has steadily increased as total RAM has increased. I only recommend people buy 1TB+ models if they need the storage unless they have a specialized use case—similarly to the previous 4GB/6GB split that also caused some cognitive dissonance.
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This is some interesting data. So the 16GB model can allocate 31% of its RAM to an app before crashing, which is worse than 49% on the first gen iPad.
On the previous split in 2018 iPad Pros, the total RAM was never advertised on spec sheet. So it made more sense to not differentiate the experience.
My iPhone is 256GB while my iPad is 32GB and I notice big differences in how much the same app is allowed to store in NAND between the devices.
I’m of the “unused RAM is wasted RAM” camp. 16GB doesn’t excite me because I can run Affinity with 8GB of RAM it excites me because as @cornchip says I can put more larger apps into memory than before without caching to NAND.
UIKit (iOS) was always architected to be a single screen paradigm. We have split view and some other additions over time to approximate AppKit features but the reality is it was never really designed to run external displays as it’s not natively a windowed environment.
“It should be easy …plug in a display and it should work” is what we say or think when we don’t have to consider the engineering effort required to do it seamlessly.
A lot of sites never quite articulated where the iPad fits into a Pro workflow beyond just running FCP or LP on an iPad. I think next year is when the next generation of codecs go mainstream. Today the AV1 encoders are getting faster, decode is coming to ARM and other processors. It’s critical for iPads because I can’t throw a 20GB RAW video at an iPad and get anything meaningful in return. Hopefully soon I can use high quality AV1 files as at least proxies along with ProRes for good iPad Pro workflows.
Yes…we’re not there yet but you can see where it’s going to go in the near future.
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That doesn’t feel like a useful way of looking at the data.
How many people say “what percentage of the available system RAM can be allocated to a single app”, and then use that as a metric for how good their device is relative to the previous versions?
The ability to consume RAM seems to be going up steadily, other than a couple data points with minor variations.
I’m guessing that if there are internal issues regarding stability as RAM gets allocated those will get ironed out in future versions. For now though, anybody with an M1 iPad presumably has a significantly better RAM allocation experience than somebody on a 2018/2020.
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Of course I’m not suggesting M1 iPad Pro is worse than iPad 1 in the absolute terms. If you look at the data on stackexchange. The percentage is going up from ～50% to ~80% until the 16GB model dropped.
That’s just a perspective. It doesn’t measure absolutely how much an app can do. It measure how much can be done relative to the full hardware potential, whatever that means.
I’m with you! I thought it looked pretty cool. Honestly, I can’t wait.
I do so many creative things with an IPad it boggles my mind! If you haven’t tried Procreate, buy it! It’s inexpensive too.
I’d love to learn how to develop software, especially for kids! But the only other language I know is Spanish! Tell me there’s very little math involved! Someone, please!
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Fair note on the percentage, but the amount of RAM available in absolute terms (megabytes / gigabytes) still seems to be substantially more on the M1 than the previous models, doesn’t it?