Successful use of M1 iPadPro for presentations with iPad mini as remote

I finally had a chance to test an iPad presentation configuration and confirm that it works.

I used my 12.9" M1 iPadPro as the presentation device, using the Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter to connect to the presentation room’s HDMI connection to the projector.

I then set up my fairly old iPad Mini as the Keynote remote with its gen1 Apple pencil. The iPad Mini worked perfectly as the remote, smoothly advancing the slides as I walked around the room untethered by any cables. The Apple Pencil allowed me to annotate slides in real-time with no delay and no issues.

Neither device was plugged into power and I had plenty of battery for this 4-hour presentation.

This was a big win for me and I suspect that I will not buy another Mac laptop, as my main use for a laptop for the past few years has been for presentations.

My desktop is a 2019 iMac. I use my iPadPro every day, mostly for annotating PDFs in DevonThink and reading talk.macpowerusers.com :blush:.

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This is quite excellent news, as I often do sales presentations but don’t want to plug my company-supplied laptop into potentially data-scraping systems available at my destinations.

Are you building your presentations with Keynote on iPad as well?

Good to read this.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned by many other people: the iPad Mini 6 does better with external displays than any of the other pre-M1 iPads I’ve tested, due to the slightly different screen dimensions, which makes for an interesting conundrum— as in your example, the size of a Mini makes it great to have in hand as a remote…

As I’m finally getting back to a place where I may need to deliver more presentations, I’m curious about presenting using apps other than Keynote (e.g. iThoughts, Concepts, Defter, Endless Paper, etc). I used to use a cool little Miracast dongle that facilitated screen-mirroring without the need for a second full device; it would just plug directly into the HDMI port and present itself as an airplay receiver. Might see if I can pick another one of those up.

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If you are using the pencil to mark up while presenting, does that mean you are presenting in editing mode rather than presenting mode?

@Aaron_Antcliff I build the presentations in Keynote on my Mac, mostly.

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@Wrothnie I’m in Keynote Presentation mode. It’s one of the coolest things about using an iPad as the remote – you can switch into annotation mode and write on your slides in real-time using the Apple Pencil. The annotations are not persistent from presentation to presentation.

Ah! Of course! I had forgotten about that function. Thank you very much. I shall have to try it out.