I stand by the remarks made in my update on how life with the M1 MacBook Pro was going. I’ve realized a more appropriate thing to have said is that this isn’t the ‘pro’ for me and I should aim to sell it when the real professional MacBook Pros are released with significantly better GPUs and more cores as well as 32 gigabytes of RAM. My $2100 13” MacBook Pro is great but coming from the Core i9 16” model it replaced, I’m ready for the next iteration of Apple’s Silicon chips.
I was in Washington DC having lunch with one of Heather’s friends when the 2018 iPad Pro was released. I ordered it via the Apple Store app before lunch was served and the specification was 11”, 256GB of storage and WiFi Only. I believe it was a roughly $900 machine. In early 2020, it was made Pro by Apple’s release of the Magic Keyboard with trackpad support. I had used Brydge’s keyboard since mid-2019 but it was the track pad support and native keyboard without any pairing that brought a few subsequent blog posts where I became a convert for the iPad lifestyle going as far as to use it for 2 straight weeks while on a motorcycle trip and keep up with day to day business. Quite a revolution. When it came time to return back to the office in April of 2021, I had to purchase an M1 MacBook Pro or consider going iPad only. I’m happy to have gone MacBook because it really is a full operating system. Just today, I decided to give Lightroom for iPad a go and you can’t delete images. Delete key doesn’t work, there’s no command to do it. It’s 3 clicks and 2 menus deep to find a button for delete. Things like this would have made my summer back at work nearly impossible. Yesterday, I had an email sent to 25 clients and they were all in BCC. If I reply all in Mail or Outlook from my sent items, it removes all of the blind carbon copied recipients. Reply All doesn’t work on BCC emails even if you were the sender. “Send Again” in Apple’s Mail app for iOS 15 does work but then you have to add formatting yourself.
The iPad Pro and iOS15 are getting close. While the M1 MacBook Pro was a stop gap and a machine I will soon sell (as in just a few days from now), the M1 iPad is so close to being a perfect machine for communication, authoring, editing and publishing. Software needs to catch up to match this hardware.
A week ago, I purchased an iPad Pro M1, 512GB, 12.9” + Cellular with a Magic Keyboard. The Apple Store bill was $2099 with AppleCare+ which is $50 more than my nearly loaded (16GB + 1 TB SSD) MacBook Pro cost in April. Can these machines do the same things? No.
I took a leap of faith on the 13” iPad (I’m not writing 12.9 over and over). The 11” was perfect as an iPad. The magic keyboard unlocked more productivity and I was left wishing the screen was larger. At night, on the couch reading or in bed, I loved the 11” screen but we did 10,000 miles this Summer in the new truck going to motorcycle events and I was working the entire time and I did most of my triage of customer issues/complaints/questions on the iPad Pro 11” powered by the A12X with 4 gigabytes of RAM. Since it wasn’t used for rich media like video and photo editing, I never got close to filling up the 256GB of storage but it was my go-to advice at every rally, camp out, bike trip, road trip and early morning email review while my coffee brewed. I loved and loathed the size all at the same time.
Initial impressions of this 13” iPad Pro powered by an M1….it’s YUGE!
For the first 72 hours, I felt like I was grabbing a laptop as the iPad is 1.5 pounds and the Magic Keyboard is 1.6. The keyboard has a lot of weight to keep things balanced and stable so a 3 pound iPad I was grabbing off the coffee table to reply to an email while watching a baseball game. I thought…there’s no way I can travel with this + MacBook Pro right? That’s a lot more weight well…a full pound more than the 11” weighed attached to its keyboard.
I promised myself I would stick with Apple’s 14 day return policy and see if this was right for me and give it a proper go. Today, I’m camping out of the car by a river in the white mountains of New Hampshire and in 5 days, I’ll be going to Vermont with 4 days for my wedding. In both instances, the laptop will stay home and we’ll see if this iPad is either too big or not good enough versus the 11” to warrant the $200 premium or the added weight/heft. I wish I was going on a flight in these 14 days so I could see how it fairs in basic-economy for reading. That’s an area I’m very worried it will be too large.
I’m used to the size around the house now and I love its size for writing this post. I used it for 2 hours on my way up to the Canadian Border to pickup 3 kegs of beer with Heather and I was going in and out of 3G/4G/5G cellular connection via Verizon’s $20 a month tablet plan and getting quite a bit of work done. The issues with inefficiency is now completely software. I have a keyboard and a track pad and a 13” screen. Replying all to an email, grabbing an old PDF via the files app and opening it in Acrobat Pro and making changes and exporting that to email and then copying it from a blank email and pasting it into the one I had written. These steps would never be required with a real filesystem and true multitasking.
Why iPad over MacBook then?
- They cost the same
- They weigh the same
- They have the same system on a chip, storage, RAM
- They have the same I/O (USB-C)
- The iPad 13” has less battery life than a MacBook Pro (40.88 MaH on iPad, 58.2 on MBP)
- The iPad software is clearly inferior for a power user
For me, it’s the full screen experience and iPadOS in general. I think Steve was on to something. The paradigm of touch, full screen apps, not mucking around with drivers, file system, PList files and directly running apps from anywhere. It makes for a rich, fast and really rewarding experience. On my home iMac with a 27” + 32” display, I run every single application except Safari in full screen mode. As much as 12 apps per display in full screen and I use Expose (or whatever it’s called now) to show all virtual desktops and move between them. Just like you do on an iPad. I didn’t try to mimic the iPad, it’s just how I work. Ever since Expose added virtual desktops maybe 6 years ago, I’ve been a full screen user. So the iPad really caters to how I prefer to use a computing platform.
The 13” iPad Pro is at the limit of screen size though. I think some people may want a 14” model so that they can break-free from a 4:3 aspect ratio. I don’t mind it. the iPad 11” was obviously more conducive to watching videos given the aspect ratio where this is not. It’s definitely a tighter width but given that I don’t watch any video on iPhone or iPad, this isn’t an issue for me. I’m an adult and have a television at home so the 4:3 doesn’t make a difference. So, with that said, I wouldn’t want this display any larger. What I do want is for all developers in-house and 3rd party to embrace the Magic Keyboard and bring more commands to the iPad ecosystem. Lightroom’s list of commands is 12. 12 things you can do with your keyboard. Not just command key commands but like that includes next photo and previous photo with the arrow keys. Pro tip, every app that I use will, if you hold down the command key, display a list of available commands. Nice way to unlock a bit of time savings.
Now that I have lived with this iPad Pro 13” for 72 hours, I don’t want to take it back to Apple. The screen displays more information, the multi-tasking that is present is much easier and it feels built for this iPad and more of a favor for models with smaller screens. The weight you get used to and it’s fine if you choose to leave the laptop home and deal with iPad OS shortcomings. The M1 was made for this machine. It’s a screamer on iPad OS. Everything is instant. The cellular function is something I haven’t had on an iPad since my iPad Air 1 (before the Pro was a thing) and I dropped it because it was cheaper to just use my iPhone’s mobile hotspot which is included in my Verizon plan but it was always a to-do. It would drain iPhone’s battery and cause the phone to get hot and on a road trip, might cause the phone to overheat because the phone would be docked in direct sunlight, running maps on CarPLay and moving data over to the iPad via hotspot. I also had issues with hotspot hitting its limit during a road trip because even Verizon unlimited was not unlimited hotspot and I’d forget to disconnect iPad from iPhone and I’d load a ton of images via MacBook Pro to iCloud Photos and now iPad + iPhone were getting those copies and it was a lot of data that was metered.
The $20 tablet plan for iPad is unlimited but the first 15GB is priority / fastest then it slows down a bit after 15GB. It also allows me to hotspot my iPad if I wanted. I’ll go with it for a while. Since I own this iPad outright and its equipped with eSIM, adding it to my Verizon account took 5 minutes. It’ll be fairly simple to remove it with a chat / call to Verizon.
The negatives of the iPad Pro 13” would be that it’s still held back by software both 1st and 3rd party. It has a small battery and only is good for about 10 hours of use on cellular data and medium brightness and the cost. This thing is not the most expensive iPad but again 1/2TB are great but how are you going to use them when it’s so hard to get data on to these things? Anyway, $1599 for this iPad and Verizon is going to give me a $200 gift card toward their service (good for 2 months in my case) after I’ve had this with them for 3 months. This promotion is only if you purchase the iPad from Apple unlocked then add it to Verizon within 30 days. They take their sweet time (90 days) to issue the $200 gift card and it’s only usable at Verizon’s website or toward your bill so $1599 becomes $1399 so long as you’re actually going to use the wireless data.
Back to the price. $1599 gives you a 13” glass tablet with data and 512GB of storage and a decent camera system (that I’ve never used) but it’s $350 more to add the trackpad and keyboard. I feel that for $1599, Apple should include the keyboard. It’s required to actually get things done on this machine. It would then make the iPad a 2-in-1 in the eyes of the industry I’m afraid but personally, I never would have upgraded my 2018 iPad Pro 11” if there wasn’t trackpad support. I loved that iPad but never got any real work done with it because pairing Bluetooth keyboards was never an elegant experience. I had to charge the Brydge keyboard separately from the iPad, as an example.
I’m over 2,000 words so I should wrap it up. I love this machine and since I’m not going back to the office for 6 months, I’m going to sell the MacBooK Pro I bought and work from the iPad as long as I can. I had very high hopes for iPad OS 15 but alas, some improvements but Apple won’t break from the iPad methodology and they’re sticking to their guns on how multi-tasking works. Maybe next year? The M1 chip and 6GB of RAM and 512GB of storage will last me many years and I hope now that there is a day that the iPad can replace my laptop. Back when I’m back in an office again permanently, I want an iPad to be the primary way i get work done but the software is still holding it back and will be for a while.
Sent from my iPad Pro
