Definitely a tempting choice though I’ve found having two devices allows me to minimize transporting them if I spend time in more than one place since everything is nicely on the cloud now (for the most part). (just in case that applies to you)
Can’t wait for telepathy to be the norm for human/computer interfaces 
Since this has turned into that kind of topic 
One very, very big impediment to the iPad being used as a sole device is the placement of the camera. It was an annoyance when video calls were relatively infrequent, but when you spend a good portion of your work life in Zoom calls it’s an abysmally terrible experience to have it on the “side”.
2 Likes
No thank you, I wouldn’t have survived my university years if telepathy was possible. 
1 Like
Apparently Apple thinks we are holding it wrong.
But it would be nice if they would at least let us plug our Logitech cameras into the USB-C port.
1 Like
Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by “edit photos” and how much effort you want to put in.
Affinity Photo is on the iPad, as is Pixelmator Photo. Both of these are fantastic apps and neither come anywhere near what I want/need. Personally I find processing photos in Affinity Photo is like taking notes in MS Word. It’s a power tool for many things, but I don’t need power tools when using the right tool is simpler. Pixelmator Photo is such a tool, designed just for processing photos. If I want to fix white balance, increase contrast, and level the horizon, Affinity Photo is fiddly compared to Pixelmator Photo and also has a much steeper learning curve, even for someone like me who knows what they want.
The first and last challenges are dealing with the filesystem. You can do it, but there are weird paradigms in use by both of these apps that get me every time. I know I could persevere and learn the process, but it’s just the first clue to the ‘adapted’ interfaces that plague the whole process.
I’m a big fan of Affinity’s apps — I own all of them — but I rarely use Photo or Designer on my iPad because it is a constant battle to find where something is. Case in point is that selection tools are a completely separate ‘persona’ on the iPad, unlike on the Mac. This is because of the “must support only fingers” requirement on the iPad.
Does the iPad have the power to process photos? Absolutely. Does it attract Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, or Luminar? Nope. Lightroom is kinda there, but only its hugely cut down and simplified new version. ON1 do have an iPad app that claims full capability but only works with your cloud library in conjunction with a purchase of the Mac app. (I don’t like ON1’s RAW conversion but I do like the desktop/mobile model they have gone with.)
Here are where I see the core limitations:
- Affinity’s interface may be a result of the limited input methods. Maybe it’s easier to use with keyboard shortcuts, I never tried it that way, but they have to allow for people who only use fingers. There are certain types of application which suffer for this.
- There is no reason file management couldn’t be super simple except Apple’s limitations in the name of security.
- The iPad would be a fanstastic tool for organising photos. Would be… if anyone actually addressed that use case properly. Does anyone remember the Jeff Han demo, which pre-dates even the iPhone? Or Microsoft’s demo of their table-sized Surface where photos were being exchanged between devices by flicking them across the table? But no. Instead, we waited until, I think, 2021 before we could even add keywords to photos in the first party app and… it’s a real chore.
Apple need to think outside the (sand)box (and outside of self organising grids!) to make the iPad a truly great device for many tasks, photography being one of them, and software writers need to as well.
All my view, etc, but I firmly side with @Katie that editing and organising photos is not a strong suit for the iPad.
It sounds like Lightroom has improved since I took a close look at it not that long ago, but I’m not talking about pro level editing at all. I’m talking about enthusiast level editing. I’ve been taking digital photographs for 18 years and have developed my knowledge over that time.
But Katie also mentioned organising. How does Lightroom fare in that department? I’d expect keywords, labels/colours, pick and reject, and albums, all of which I use most times I’m in Lightroom Classic.
Nah, please don’t pick on me. ;o) I am a kind, rather opinionated, open-minded soul.
Ok. Just open the app Photos on your iPad. Then open it on your Mac. There is SO VERY much that the app can do on a Mac that you cannot do on an Ipad.
I am not referring to the bells and whistles you’ll find on the iPad photo apps. I ought to know because I have 90% of them. I was referring to the Apple Photos app.
If you get a chance, take a look at MacSparky’s Photos course. The iPad is just catching up on some of it. You couldn’t even add any tagging type or identifying info to Photos on the iPad until lately. The organizing on the app for the Mac is wonderful, imho.
Now part of that is the software itself I am sure.
Then you get into automating. OMG. If I want tedium, I’ll stick with my iPad. If I need to get a project done, I might best head for my Mac even though I am far more familiar with the iPad.
They are different animals and they often do different things differently. But, at this point, I do not have to select the Mac over the Ipad over the iPhone. Just so long as I do not go anywhere near the top of the Apple line, I can have afford all three!
2 Likes
I don’t really know what a iPad Pro weighs. But I went to the ER a few nights ago. Waited in there all night long. I brought my iPad Air, my iPad mini and my phone. I thought about bringing my M1 Air laptop but although it is a light laptop it is still a lot to be lugging around after awhile, especially since I’m a woman. I am REALLY glad I didn’t. Now if I were thirty years younger, I’d be able to better carry it but a couple of iPads really didn’t bother me.
12" MacBook was 920 grams. We need an Apple Silicon version.
Though the current iPad Pros are between 466 and 685 grams. Until you add a keyboard that is.
2 Likes
Thanks!
Have you tried Photoshop Elements? I had a heckuva time getting it set up with their crazy tech support. And it tends to crash after a while but I just reboot (ie will not open a file I am not already working on… it doesn’t crash while I am working on something). There is a trial you can do.
You might prefer that than to keep paying for Adobe ad nauseum. But you get to use their other apps, too, right?
I essentially use it for digital scrapbooking. Took a bit to get the hang of it but now I really like it. I haven’t even scratched the surface on it though. I found out I can colorize black and white photos which I thought was a very neat trick.
Also I bought Pixelmator Pro which I also have both apps for the iPad. The main reason I got Pixelmator Pro is because I had a gift card and I am pretty sure it was on sale too.
My biggest issue with the iOS platform is the file management aspect. Its gotten better but not great. On a mac you have access to everything. Whereas on iOS you might, but not likely. Let me give a specific example.
Posting to Instagram. If the photo you want to post is in your phone library or icloud photos no problem. However IG doesn’t support any other sources. So what if the photo you want to post in on Google Drive or Dropbox. Its not that easy. Using a share sheet from say the files app, or Google drive app you can select IG but then you just get a box for a caption and not the full options to tag, etc. Sure this is somewhat more of an issue with IG, and I have created a workaround by making a custom shortcut to share to IG which ironically that way IG gives you the full posting options. This just goes to show the inconsistent environment between the apps and the system.
When you are on MacOS when an app or website needs to call a file manager operation such as open, save, etc they are all the same, whatever the finder has access to you can give that app or website. Once the “system” has access to it everything else does as well. No hoops, no hurdles, it just works.
5 Likes
Yes this is a major pain point. On iOS there’s tighter integration at the expense of flexibility sadly.
I much prefer the open garden of MacOS (in spite of the encroaching ‘security’ limitation but those aren’t insurmountable).
1 Like
that is a tremendous app!
I think I have an understanding as to why the iPad v. traditional computer rages on. For many of us who use portable computing machines, we are looking for (generally speaking) smaller devices that can do every computing task we can throw at them. If iPad does not enable us to replace altogether the computer we’d normally turn to, that means it’s just an adjunct device. Thirty years of making computers more portable is thrown out the window if we have to contemplate carrying around two machines. The equally unpalatable alternative is that we have to bring a device that doesn’t quite get the job done.
Add two things to the mix. First, the “cool” factor – an iPad is fun to use, it’s not an exaggeration to call it “magical” – it feels that way to me when I’m annotating PDFs on a glass screen with an Apple Pencil or cross-examining a witness while zooming into documents projected wirelessly across the globe in realtime. iPad is also so versatile. You can use it in a variety of configurations (with or without a mouse, without or without a keyboard, with or without an Apple Pencil.) Because of those things, some of us just want to root for it to be the single best general (or special) purpose machine out there, and that we can use it and it alone for everything we want to do.
That’s my theory.
There appear to be four camps when it comes to the iPad vs. Laptop divide. In no particular order, they are the following. (1) iPad can do everything any other computer can, but it may take me a thousand steps to do something I can do in three steps on my Mac, (2) I’d never touch an iPad for anything other than reading a magazine (or insert some other “content consumption” activity), (3) I wish the iPad could do more of the things I need a computer for so I don’t need to have a laptop/desktop/whatever other machine, and (4) the emerging group that sees iPad as an additional tool that one needs/wants to have to accompany their “main” computer.
Some of the comments in this thread, perfectly epitomize all of these camps:
In all candor, I’ve bounced around in all four of these camps. Of late, I find myself in the camp 4 spot because there are a number of tools that I use on my iPad that I can’t use on my Mac, but the iPad doesn’t do everything that I need it to do.
This fall I was able to do an experiment. My MacBook Pro died, so I ordered one of the new ones. It was the most expensive computer I’d ever bought, but did I really need it?
I already had an expensive iPad Pro, so perhaps you won’t fault me for wanting my iPad to be able to serve all my computing needs, allowing me to wash my hands clean of a traditional computer and return my MacBook Pro once it arrived. It was going to take about a month to be delivered, so I conducted an experiment to see just how productive that I could be on the iPad.
I discovered some very interesting things during my experiment, which I will provide more details about in a separate post. One notable thing is that the iPad and iPadOS has come a very long way and it is surprising how much you can do simply and efficiently. What is more, many of the computing things one wants to do are performed differently on an iPad than one would go about doing them on the Mac. Yet, when I timed myself doing these things, it didn’t take me longer to do them on an iPad than it did on my Mac (or the difference was negligible). Thus, for some things, the iPad is on par with the Mac, but it feels alien because we have to employ a different method to get it done than what we are used to. (Note also that I’m not talking about some byzantine Federico Viticci 300-step process that requires you to have 17 different shortcuts and a dedicated remote server running background scripts. I have no patience for such efforts.)
My experiment showed that a lot more of what I rely on my Mac for could be done on an iPad and that it was not terribly difficult to do those things on the iPad. “So,” the patient reader who has gotten this far in my comment might ask, “did you return your fancy new MacBook Pro?” To which I would respond, “not so fast.”
Even after experiencing for a month just how productive I can be on an iPad, when I reach for a computing device to accomplish a task I almost invariably reach for my MacBook. That’s not because the MacBook is the shiny new tech object on my desk.
It just feels, well, freeing to do things on my Mac, less constrained, anything is possible. I don’t think it’s a “muscle memory” issue or old habits dying hard. It’s still easier to get things done on my Mac.
(As as side note, my 10- and 8-year-old boys’ first computing devices were iPads. They got laptops for school last year, and they prefer them over their iPads. Don’t get me wrong, they love their iPads. But the laptop is king to them.)
Some things are easier and better on an iPad. But those are usually one-off tasks. Want to process 300 documents, change the names of a hundred files, manipulate a 5,000 line text file? It’s almost never easy to do those things on an iPad.
Want to consult an app while you’re on a Zoom call? Can’t do that without the camera turning off.
Still, there are places where the iPad outshines the Mac. We can all list tons of examples, so I won’t bore you recounting them here.
The other difficulty with iPad is that the software (stock and 3rd party) does not always work reliably. The Files.app on iPad is pretty great. Alas, I have to reset my iPad regularly when doing a lot of work with files because something unknown to me gums up the works when transferring a file from one place to the other. And the integration between Dropbox and the Files app is miserable.
We can all agree and accept that some people’s workloads allow them to be 100% iPad only. Nevertheless, until the iPad can do all the things we take for granted being able to do on our Macs (or Windows PCs) and can do those things reliably, it can never be a true mainstream replacement.
iPad may get there. It isn’t there yet. Until then, some of us will walk away from iPad, some of us will modify the ways we work to enable us to accomplish our computing tasks solely on an iPad, and some of us will discover that we have needs that require us to invest in both machines and make room in the budget. Good thing Apple makes devices that last a long time.
P.S. I’ve written this all on my Mac. Why do I naturally gravitate to the Mac for something I think I could have done almost as easily on the iPad sitting right next to me?
9 Likes
I own a sedan, an old SUV to haul things and a Miata. They are all great for different things. The sedan rides better and uses less fuel. The Miata has no purpose other than fun to drive in a nice day. It doesn’t necessarily mean one is better than another, just different. If I had to own just one car, it would be the SUV, because it does the most stuff. Now that the Mac has all day battery life, it is the SUV.
I
6 Likes
This alone is worth a Mac ! 
3 Likes
Exactly. When I was starting out executives and managers carried their notes, contacts, and calendars, etc. in leather bound notebooks. Then came car phones and mobile phones, Palm Pilots, and laptops. Now some are swapping their laptops for iPads and never use a computer outside of the office.
Most of them never needed a “computer”, they just needed information and a way to communicate their decisions.
2 Likes
My only vehicle is a pickup truck for the same reason.
2 Likes
I have both but enjoy driving the truck more!
3 Likes