{"id":8348,"date":"2020-09-16T17:34:18","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T21:34:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/?p=8348"},"modified":"2020-09-16T17:34:18","modified_gmt":"2020-09-16T21:34:18","slug":"technology-two-weeks-with-only-an-ipad-iphone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/2020\/09\/16\/technology-two-weeks-with-only-an-ipad-iphone\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology: Two Weeks with only an iPad + iPhone"},"content":{"rendered":"

In May, I posted that my MacBook Pro was sold and I was without a laptop<\/a>. This is still the case and there\u2019s no pity party needed, I\u2019m 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\u2019t need your pity but I figured at some point this year, I\u2019d go somewhere and need to get work done and I wouldn\u2019t have access to a laptop for the first time since 2001.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Instead, I focused on doing essential work only. I don\u2019t work on the iPhone. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s most expensive Unlimited Plan which guaranteed I think 70 gigabytes of hotspot coverage and 75GB of \u201cpriority data\u201d before throttling kicks in (so much for unlimited). I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

Could I permanently get my job done on an iPad Pro? Hell no. I can\u2019t envision in my line of work that ever being possible and unfortunately, I\u2019d have to own two iPads, one 13\u201d model for work and one 11\u201d model for reading and play. I don\u2019t like the full size iPad for anything but working on something and that\u2019s why I own the 11\u201d version as I can undock it from the keyboard and still read on it in portrait mode comfortably.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve heard of but this iPad Pro is 1 month away from its 2 years of AppleCare coverage so I\u2019m glad it failed now and not later. The replacement iPad Pro is back to keeping closed in the keyboard without any issues.<\/p>\n

The iPad\u2019s multi-tasking was great and I never tired of the magic keyboard. Keystrokes were reliable and felt good. Writing a post this long isn\u2019t exhausting using WordPress\u2019 iOS app. Microsoft has done a fantastic job with their mobile Office 365 applications but I\u2019d 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\u2019s 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\u2019d like a bit more of a UI that confirms \u201cyeah we\u2019re good, you\u2019re all backed up to the cloud\u201d. It has background syncing so I should have trusted it but just couldn\u2019t bring myself to trust Files had my back at all times.<\/p>\n

Apple\u2019s 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\u2019d say they\u2019re doing a fantastic job of adding enterprise features to a consumer product and they\u2019ll get there eventually but Outlook\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m charging off of these things.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve done a lot of motorcycle trips with just an iPad + Keyboard since late-2017 and it\u2019s nice to just carry the iPad and still get by. No one noticed I wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s condominium questionnaire that was 6 pages long and Adobe\u2019s 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\u2019d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m looking forward to 2025 when maybe finally an iPad is my only mobile computer, not just due to COVID but by choice I\u2019m laptop less. We\u2019ll see and I\u2019m thinking I\u2019ll 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In May, I posted that my MacBook Pro was sold and I was without a laptop. This is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-09-16T21:34:41Z","apple_news_api_id":"957ef076-9ab7-4329-8419-55a4366b35fd","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-09-16T21:34:42Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AlX7wdpq3QymEGVWkNms1_Q","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_custom_appearance":"","csco_disable_excerpt_posts_layout":false,"csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8348","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-technology","7":"cs-entry","8":"cs-video-wrap"},"apple_news_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pb3IC4-2aE","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8582,"url":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/2021\/09\/26\/technology-the-m1-ipad-pro-12-9-2021\/","url_meta":{"origin":8348,"position":0},"title":"Technology: The M1 iPad Pro 12.9″ (2021)","author":"Adam Chandler","date":"September 26, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I stand by the remarks made in my update on how life with the M1 MacBook Pro was going. 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