!The Results are In-Conclusion! 1 Month iPad Only Experiment with New M4 iPad Pro

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I have some follow-up on this. Up front, sorry for continuing to derail this thread a little bit. I agree with everybody that I wish the iPad had more desktop-like features. I do not want it to be a Mac (I have Macs for that), but it’d be great if more of my workflow were available on it. For that to happen, I need JIT code to run, access to the audio subsystem, desktop-equivalent features in Safari so Figma can run, access to background apps like Codekit on the Mac, a full-featured Terminal app, and more multitasking features so I can run more windows at once. We’re not there yet.

OK, now that that’s out of the way, my update:

I inventoried all the work I’d done on my iPad in the past few months and realized it is more sensible for me to digitally sketch than it is to physically sketch. A lot of the old sketches have some utility in later work, and it makes no sense to keep paper sketches for 6+ months while I work on large projects. So I figured I would keep the 2017 iPad Pro I had and return the 2024 one, but the smell of something melting really spooked me.

So I brought the 2017 iPad Pro to the Apple Store. I figured I’d trade it in. I explain the situation. “No problem,” the man says. “As long as it still works, we’ll help you out.” I get my trade in value, and we go through the process.

When it comes time to wipe my iPad Pro and disable Find My, the iPad freezes. It gets very warm. The screen goes black. “This happens all the time,” the man says. “That screen is buggy. I’ll go help somebody else quick. It’ll boot back up in a minute.”

He returns a couple minutes later, but the iPad still won’t turn on. “You mentioned it doesn’t hold a charge, eh? Well. It’s traded in at this point. It’s our problem now. Let me plug it in.”

He plugs it in. Minutes later, it still doesn’t charge.

Dear reader, my iPad Pro completely kicked the bucket mere moments after I traded it in for a new one. After much fussing, he managed to hard reset it and got it to boot up just long enough to confirm that the data had been wiped. Then it shut down again.

So I didn’t end up returning my new iPad Pro. I did, however, return the Magic Keyboard, and got a Smart Folio instead. Anything that requires a keyboard is, for me, better done on my Macs.

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I do have great appreciation for people who can do it. Watching Federico or Chris Lawley work is often amazing and makes me reconsider how I am using my iPad (much as this forum has). Yet, at the same time, the whole time I am thinking “That would be easier on a Mac.”

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I agree; some tasks are easier on the Mac, and some are easier on the iPad. The question I’m striving to answer is, “Given the reasons “why” I’d ideally like to use only the iPad that I shared in my OP, are the occasional less-than-optimal workflows worth it to gain the advantages I listed?” I don’t know, but I hope to have a better answer in a month. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Mac users coming to iPadOS often express that they feel like they have to work around iPadOS which makes sense as they’re used to macOS and know it well. iPadOS is different enough that friction is introduced. And I suspect the smaller screen of the iPad is a significant factor that is not discussed as much as it should be. For anyone used to a 14"+ screen and possibly multiple screens, the switch to a small 11" iPad would likely feel limiting. It seems like a recipe for frustration. Add to that the larger touch-based chrome of iPadOS and that 11" screen seems even more cramped.

In 2024 I don’t do anything special to work around iPadOS. This was not the case in 2010 through 2018 when I did have to adapt to a more limited OS. There’s no doubt that the single window mode of iPad required an adaption. Early split screen mode required an adaption. It got better but even the current split screen mode with slide over, more capable than previous versions, is obviously not unlimited windowing. Stage Manager is not unlimited windowing.

For whatever reason, be it the tasks we need to do or our temperament, it seems some of us who come from the Mac (I’d been a daily user of the Mac since 1993ish) find the iPad fairly easy to adapt to. I suspect that for some it’s also a question of how they transition. I never intended to “give up my Mac and switch to an iPad”. I just gradually did so without intent. Any adaption or stress was gradual, no pressure. I could and often did use the Mac along side of the iPad. But for whatever reason at some point around 2017 I found I’d mostly stopped using my Mac and didn’t make much fuss about it. I just kept doing what I was doing with the iPad.

Honestly I think these experiments to replace the Mac with an iPad are far more likely to failure than success because of the approach being taken. There is an immediate pressure added to a transition that might likely be smoother if just allowed to happen on its own.

People often will happily use two Macs, say, a desktop Mac and a laptop going from one to the other. Why must it be with the iPad that I can only use one and must give up the other? I would guess that the combination of two is better than one as each can do things the other can’t. Almost by definition, the best scenario is to have one of each and use them as complimentary devices.

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I’ll make it easier for everyone…I use both my Mac Mini and iPad Pro. I have learned to understand the purposes for both. I won’t make this post longer than it needs to, but before I had my Mac Mini, I had a MacBook Pro that I used heavily.

MacBook Pro was the heavy duty driver and the iPad Pro was what I traveled with depending on the project involved.

I can’t tell you how many times…I would accidentally swipe up or down on my MacBook Pro…so…reallly…just give me a MacBook Pro with the option for touchscreen like the iPad

a mac version of the Surface :rofl:

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I don’t think this is true for anything that is not explicitly due to the hardware.

I.e., iPadOS does not make anything easier than macOS, (unless you count accidentally cancelling a process because you tapped on a notification).

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I was thinking in terms of annotating and reading PDFs, signing documents, creating graphics, using FreeForm, and the like. :slightly_smiling_face:

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But aren’t those all explicitly due to the hardware, that is, the touchscreen and Pencil, rather than some inherent superiority of the iPadOS operating system over macOS?

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Right, all of those workflows are hardware-specific benefits. They aren’t iPadOS-specific, they’re simply possible because you can use a stylus with those apps.

As I get at in another thread, if you’ve ever used a Surface or predecessor, the capabilities you mention aren’t novel or unique. In fact, they’ve worked great on Windows since the early 2000s.

No one is arguing that the iPad should get rid of the Pencil or stop offering 5G or stop having a slate form-factor. And, in fact, everyone seems to be in agreement that iPadOS needs a variety of improvements. So I’m not sure why these debates continue to devolve into circular arguments, hahah.

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My bad, you are right. My first mistake this year! :joy:

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You are correct; upon reflection, those are hardware-related—my mistake.

I agree that iPadOS needs improvement to match the hardware’s capabilities more closely. I’m not arguing otherwise, nor am I trying to start an argument (though it looks like I may have based on some of the responses above! :slightly_smiling_face:).

I’m merely trying to determine IF based on my workflow needs, I can use just an iPad exclusively for the reasons I stated in my OP. I’ll know in a month. :crossed_fingers:t2: Today, I used Zoom on the new iPad for the first time. The repositioning of the camera makes this work well. My biggest challenge at the moment is I cannot figure out how to get my ScanSnap to communicate with my iPad. It scans via WiFi to my Mac but I haven’t figured out how to do it on the iPad. It is possible because there are support articles about it. I just haven’t figured it out yet. :slightly_smiling_face:

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My thinking here is that our window into the real world is skewed.

Those of us that listen to tech podcasts, participate in forums, etc are not the norm. In a sampling of my extended family of around 25 adults, NONE of them listen to tech podcasts. All of them use an iPhone, many of them also use an iPad, a few use a Mac or Windows. Most of them will tell you that their primary computer is their iPhone.

I don’t know what percentage of Apple users participate in the tech sphere of forums but I’d guess it’s VERY LOW.

When thinking of sample pools of users and our perceptions, I think it’s heavily skewed from real world use. When we think of the opinions of podcasters we’re talking about how many? 100 or less? Maybe 40 or less? Here on MPU forums my wild guess is we’ve got maybe 100 regular posters. My point is we’re in a bubble of computer experts. The starting point in this crowd is the Mac or another desktop OS.

But consider for a moment millions of iPads are being sold. Millions of users are buying apps on the App Store. I did a blog post awhile back and looked at some App Store stats. Just a quick sample of some of the big hitters I looked at, these are the number of ratings and average rating, not the number of app downloads:

  • Microsoft Word, 2 million ratings, 4.7 stars
  • Microsoft Outlook, 6.6 million ratings, 4.8 stars
  • Microsoft Teams, 3.2 million ratings, 4.8 stars
  • Microsoft Excel, 1 million ratings, 4.8 stars
  • Microsoft OneNote, 855,000 ratings, 4.7 stars
  • Microsoft Power BI (I’d never heard of it but it’s for business data analytics ) 67,000 ratings, 4.7 stars
  • Salesforce, 295,000 ratings, 4.7 stars
  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator, 42,000 ratings, 4.8 stars
  • LinkedIn Learning, 78,000 ratings, 4.8 stars
  • Procreate, 40,000 ratings, 4.5 stars
  • Sketchbook, 216,000 ratings, 4.8 stars
  • Canva 1.9 million ratings, 4.9 stars
  • Lightroom, 38,000 ratings, 4.8 stars
  • AutoCAD, 6,000 ratings, 4.4 stars
  • Morpholio Trace - Sketch CAD 9,600 ratings, 4.7 stars

People are out there using those apps and finding them useful. It seems to me that those numbers and high ratings should provide some additional, useful context outside of our bubble.

Of course it’s also true that the iPad is an exceptional entertainment device. But those stats would indicate that it is FAR more than that for many users.

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But, are those stats for the iPad or all devices?

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Oh, well, I hadn’t considered that. Looking at it some of those have the same stats across phone and iPad so are shared reviews. Not sure if the Mac is included. That certainly throws a wrench in my use of that statistic.

I’ll have to look at some other apps. For example, Adobe Illustrator is iPad only on the App Store (no phone app), 32,000 ratings, 4.5 stars. I don’t think the Mac is a part of that. So, I’d guess there are quite a few apps that are well rated with tens of thousands of reviews. So, it may still be a relevant statistic worth considering.

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I am a heavy user of Excel, I use it for hours a day at work and home. The iPad version is fine for light data entry and viewing spreadsheets. No one is using that app to do anything more than that. I don’t know what those reviews are doing on it, but it can’t be much more than making a shopping list, and even then, that would be a frustrating use case.

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+1

At my last job, out of 150 - 200 users there were two people. I was one of them and I recommended the other for my job when I retired.

In 2017 Apple revealed there were 100 million Mac users. Who knows how many there are today but I would guess less than 1% of Mac users are “real” power users. And only a small percent of them are in the forums.

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Here is one more result of an experiment like @Bmosbacker’s. The YouTuber does not say this explicitly in his video, but it sounds like this is the first iPad he’s ever used (or at least owned). I’m sharing this video, as with the previous one, only because they are germane and may be of interest to all of us interacting on this thread.

The video is well-bookmarked, but if you want to skip to his final thoughts: https://youtu.be/wylEdsH2FjE?t=765

Or skip to his time trial for exporting a ProRes Log video, comparing his M1 Max MacBook Pro and his M4 iPad Pro: https://youtu.be/wylEdsH2FjE?t=694

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This is me, too…except I’ll add I want the Surface that has the detachable keyboard so I can ditch it when I want to go into surf/reading mode. Would LOVE for Apple to make this device!

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I’ve heard that usability researchers don’t give macOS great marks, even though Macs have always had a reputation for being easy to use.

That’s likely because underneath the user-friendly point-and-click interface—the dock, menu bar, traffic light window buttons, etc.—there’s a ton of power user features that aren’t easily discoverable by poking around the GUI. You have to learn them by reading the docs, spending time on user forums, etc.

I doubt one in 10,000 Mac users knows that macOS supports a collection of emacs keybindings. What’s wild is that it’s not just macOS. They even work on an iPhone if you’re using a Bluetooth keyboard. For example, control-t will transpose the letters on either side of the cursor.

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Yeah, I can’t speak to it as I don’t use Excel myself. I do use Numbers often for tracking/creating my client invoices as well as a document for tracking different bank and credit card accounts. I also use it for a client who runs a yoga retreat. All his bookings are managed in Numbers. Probably not too large or complicated as these things go but several sheets and around 1,000 rows at the moment. And we manage his contacts/mailing lists with another Numbers document which is significantly larger, 10,000 rows or so. But it’s a fairly simple spreadsheet.

Nothing complicated but I’ve found Numbers easily handles what I need.