In May, I posted that my MacBook Pro was sold and I was without a laptop. This is still the case and there’s no pity party needed, I’m very fortunate to have an ultra fast iMac, massive two monitor setup, an iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard and an iPhone 11 Pro. I don’t need your pity but I figured at some point this year, I’d go somewhere and need to get work done and I wouldn’t have access to a laptop for the first time since 2001.
From August 21st through the 5th of September, this was my reality. I was in Colorado / Utah or en route to and from Colorado or Utah with nothing but an iPhone, AirPods Pro and an iPad Pro (2018) with Magic Keyboard. How did that go?
First of all, I was off-work from my day job so there was minimal work in that front. My second job operates almost entirely on phone calls and emails and I have to say that it went just fine. The iPad is still not a production computer in my opinion. For example, I captured 480 gigabytes of video & photos in those 2 weeks on my Canon 5D, DJI Mavic Air 2 and GoPros 6, 7 and Session 5 and all of that media remained on MicroSD cards and was not transferred to my 256GB iPad Pro. I could have edited things on the iPad but what was the point? It would have taken a lot of time, filled up the built in storage and I would have taken time away from my trip to do it instead of enjoying the vacation. Yes I have Adobe Creative Cloud, Office 365 and Apple’s iApps and I also brought along my USB-C SD Card reader from Apple so sure importing 1300 raw images into Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop for iPad was possible but a waste of time away from the trip.
Instead, I focused on doing essential work only. I don’t work on the iPhone. It’s a utility device that I use for maps, music, GPS logging and capturing video (attached to a gimbal of course). The iPad Pro was used for reading RSS feeds, participating in Zoom/Microsoft Teams meetings, using Yammer (our internal social network), working in Outlook/Mail.app and occasionally using Apple Files for iPad to open things on Microsoft OneDrive or DropBox into Office 365 apps like Excel, PowerPoint and Word. One meeting was at 5AM Mountain Standard Time and I was sitting on my motorcycle in a parking lot tethered to my iPhone with the iPad’s wifi connection on a Microsoft Teams meeting with people from Berlin and Amsterdam using my AirPods Pro and split view using Teams & PowerPoint to share a project I was working on. No latency, no issues with multi-tasking and thanks to the terminal nature of computers now, my iOS device so long as it had a reliable 4G LTE connection, I could participate just as if I was home.
On the trip, I used 38 gigabytes of personal hotspot primarily due to the video calls and in total my account showed 78 gigabytes of data usage. When in New Hampshire, my GF and I have a shared 5GB plan without hotspot but on this trip, I went to Verizon’s most expensive Unlimited Plan which guaranteed I think 70 gigabytes of hotspot coverage and 75GB of “priority data” before throttling kicks in (so much for unlimited). I’m glad I spent the extra money because I never looked for a Wifi hotspot. I just tethered the entire time including to download a few YouTube videos for offline viewing so I could catch up on videos when we were camping in the middle of the woods without any cell phone coverage.
Could I permanently get my job done on an iPad Pro? Hell no. I can’t envision in my line of work that ever being possible and unfortunately, I’d have to own two iPads, one 13” model for work and one 11” model for reading and play. I don’t like the full size iPad for anything but working on something and that’s why I own the 11” version as I can undock it from the keyboard and still read on it in portrait mode comfortably.
During the trip, 5 days from home the Magic Keyboard and iPad Pro stopped clicking closed with an affirmative snap when I was done working. Turns out the magnets in the iPad gave out and the keyboard itself was fine. Interesting thing to note and not something I’ve heard of but this iPad Pro is 1 month away from its 2 years of AppleCare coverage so I’m glad it failed now and not later. The replacement iPad Pro is back to keeping closed in the keyboard without any issues.
The iPad’s multi-tasking was great and I never tired of the magic keyboard. Keystrokes were reliable and felt good. Writing a post this long isn’t exhausting using WordPress’ iOS app. Microsoft has done a fantastic job with their mobile Office 365 applications but I’d like to see more keyboard shortcuts and Apple Pencil features added. Microsoft Excel when I really got dirty and wanted to do some complicated equations and cell formatting quickly hit a wall and I was stuck missing the desktop client. Outlook, PowerPoint and Word held their own on everything I threw at them. Apple’s Files App was simple to a fault meaning while I had no issues with document syncing and sharing, the simplicity of the interface sometimes had me wondering if the file saved and if all was well. I’d like a bit more of a UI that confirms “yeah we’re good, you’re all backed up to the cloud”. It has background syncing so I should have trusted it but just couldn’t bring myself to trust Files had my back at all times.
Apple’s Mail was nicer than Outlook and my first stop but as soon as I needed to forward a meeting, configure MS Teams or do complicated scheduling, I moved to Outlook. I do subscribe to Fantastical and I’d say they’re doing a fantastic job of adding enterprise features to a consumer product and they’ll get there eventually but Outlook’s first party features were too strong and easy to use. I think Fantastical will be great in a couple of years but the feature parity between iPad and MacOS for Fantastical is nearly identical so that made it easy to transition between platforms easily.
Battery life of the iPad while doing real work suffered. I was usually at 70% after a couple of meetings or a session in PowerPoint for an hour. I travel with 40,000 MAH batteries from Anker so I never ran out of juice and would top them up every 5 days at a cafe or restaurant and they got me through the trip but keep in mind I have more than just iPad + iPhone that I’m charging off of these things.
I’ve done a lot of motorcycle trips with just an iPad + Keyboard since late-2017 and it’s nice to just carry the iPad and still get by. No one noticed I wasn’t with a a laptop on this trip. Complicated things in multi-tasking like receiving a hand written filled out PDF and manually looking at that while entering the data into a database was something that wasn’t important to do on the trip so I just kept that email flagged until I get home. Of the hundreds of emails I get a week, I had 18 flagged to take care of when I got home, things that were just faster on a desktop like filling in a bank’s condominium questionnaire that was 6 pages long and Adobe’s Fill & Sign app for iOS was just too basic and the multi-tasking between 4 places to get the information I needed to fill it in took about an hour and I was half way through so I told the client I’d get to it when I got home and they were okay with that. I filled it out in 6 minutes on my iMac in Adobe Acrobat with my 2-monitor setup so I had all of the info at my fingertips.
I’m looking forward to 2025 when maybe finally an iPad is my only mobile computer, not just due to COVID but by choice I’m laptop less. We’ll see and I’m thinking I’ll probably embrace it. But it would need to allow me to edit raw images and 4K video in an equivalent way to how I do with pro applications on my iMac. If not, I’ll probably still have a MacBook and will probably always have a desktop Mac.