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We tend to categorize the use of our devices between two categories: content creation and content consumption. However, IT has evolved in recent years, and while we continue to create and consume content, we also spend a lot of time modifying it. This is not a new type of work – publishers, for example, rely on author-created work and modify it according to the publication for which they are working.
The iPad has always been considered a consumer content device, ideal for browsing the web and watching videos. There are exceptions, such as the music industry or drawing, where the iPad is used to create phenomenal content. But for most of us, the iPad consumes content better than creating it. However, the new 2018 iPad is also ideal for content modification – what many of us do daily.
Apple was kind enough to lend me the new 11 inch 11 inch iPad for a few weeks with the Apple pencil. This is the high-end model with 1 TB of storage and LTE connectivity. To make things a bit easier to use, I've personally purchased the Apple folio keyboard shell to use with this iPad.
This is not a criticism of the iPad Pro – Gareth Beavis has already done a fantastic job. It is rather a description of my use of the iPad for a few weeks.
I've already tried replacing my MacBook Pro with an iPad when the original 12.9-inch iPad came out, but I went back to the laptop for flexibility that He offered. I was pretty sure that the latest iPad Pro, at least with iOS 12, would still not replace my laptop full-time, but I wanted to see where it was.
The size
As with the latest generation of iPad Pro, the 2018 model of the iPad Pro is available in two sizes. The smaller 10.5-inch iPad Pro is now an 11-inch version and the larger 12.9-inch version has the same screen size but is offered in a smaller size. I definitely prefer the smaller one because of its lightness and size, more manageable in one hand.
As you might expect, the build quality is excellent, although the new iPad now looks a bit generic without the main button. My daughter thought it was a "tablet" and not an iPad, which shows how much weight Apple has in the tablet category – it's an iPad or just another tablet.
Define the job – the biggest part is on the web
My workflow is split between my Mac in the office, my MacBook Pro and my cell phone, which I constantly rotate between an iPhone and an Android phone. For many, the iPad is their only computer – my wife uses one as such. But its use differs considerably from mine. I do a LOT of different things on my computer: email, messaging and web apps, editing photos and videos, working in documents and spreadsheets. At any given time, several applications are open and I switch them frequently.
On my Mac, most of the time is spent in the Chrome browser. That's how I access our CMS for editing articles, consulting my professional email, creating GSuite documents, using Xero for business accounting, and consulting web analytics for everyday use. I use a lot more Chrome than to read news websites, use Slack, Tweetdeck, WhatsApp, as well as Salesforce.
The iPad does not have a desktop browser, so you get Mobile Safari which, IMHO, is its biggest weakness. Google Chrome is available for the iPad but, because of Apple's restrictions on iOS, it can not use its own rendering engine and must stick to the Apple Webkit, which makes it as impractical as Mobile Safari.
That said, there are iOS apps available for most of the web apps I use, such as Xero, Salesforce, and GSuite. Some of these applications do not offer as much functionality as their web applications, but are powerful enough to be used in most cases.
Communication is a big part of our job. We have been using Slack for a long time for internal discussions within the team. The iPad app for Slack works great for everything I do during a normal work day. Besides Slack, I also sometimes use Google Hangouts for video conferencing and the iPad is just as good for that.
Where the iPad has failed, it is with WhatsApp which is the default chat client for a billion users and which is extremely popular in the Middle East for personal and professional communications. There is no iPad client for WhatsApp and it does not work with Mobile Safari. So I have to manually select my phone every time I receive a message.
Other applications
Besides using Chrome for everything that I mentioned above, there are other applications that I use daily on Mac. One of them is access to my RSS feeds, which helps me keep up to date with the rapidly evolving work of technology. This is an area in which the iPad offers a better experience than the Mac because of its touch screen.
The application I use on my desktop is Reeder, which is nice, but the one on my iPhone is Newsify, which is also optimized for the iPad. It is much easier and more attractive to browse the elements of the iPad and follow the news.
I also use a password manager and my favorite option is 1Password, which works as well on Mac as on iPad, iPhone and Android. In fact, using 1Password on the iPad is a better experience than Mac because FaceID speeds up its authentication much faster.
Although we use GSuite at work for documents and spreadsheets, there is really no way around Microsoft Office – I get tons of attachments as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files. Microsoft creates good iPad apps for each of them and, even though I have experienced frustration, especially when editing a Powerpoint presentation, it was not something that I could not overcome.
Editing photos and videos
I am not a professional photo editor, but I have to work on photos for comments and articles. Most of my changes require cropping and resizing photos, changing color levels, and adding text layers. Using Pixelmator on iPad allows me to do all that. Although I'm more comfortable with a Mac, it's only because I've been using a keyboard and mouse for decades.
If you want to do more than just edit images and create illustrations, the Apple pencil can be an amazing tool. Almost everyone met who used a Wacom tablet to draw on their computer preferred to work on the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.
Along with the photos, I'm also working on Final Cut Pro for editing short videos, mainly for our Instagram channel with unboxing videos, and so on. Again, my workflow is not extremely complicated, but I work with separate audio and video files that are imported from SD cards from cameras and voice recorders.
Although the iPad can import video files into the Photos application, it does not see audio files from an SD card. This highlights the lack of a really accessible file system on the iPad. I already complained about this before when I watched the 12.9-inch iPad Pro a few years ago and unfortunately, little has changed since then.
For me, it is there that I felt the most restricted with an iPad. There are some video editing tools available on the iPad, such as iMovie, which I found to be too basic. Although Adobe has released Premiere Rush on the iPad, I have not played much with it. It was so unfortunate that I could not harness the power of Final Cut Pro on the iPad.
Conclusion
Let's move an element away: the iPad is a fully functional computer for most people. I tend to use my computer for a lot more than average, and I've been using PCs / Macs for decades. Despite this, I almost see myself using this new iPad as the main computer.
It's better than the Mac in many ways – I prefer the iPad to stay up to date with my RSS feeds or to use Slack, as well as for teleconferencing. FaceID is also much faster to unlock my iPad than TouchID on my 2015 MacBook Pro. And LTE connectivity keeps me connected to the office no matter where I go.
The photo or video editing is still behind the iPad, and I see no reason why it can not match the Mac, especially given the crazy speed of the performance and the beauty of its 120Hz screen.
In my opinion, Apple has to work on three areas to make the iPad shine:
1) Better access to the file system. I understand that Apple does not want users to stick random USB sticks on the iPad now that there is a USB port on the iPad. But there are ways that Apple could allow the opening of specific file types, such as in the Files application on iOS or require applications to go through a secondary verification process to open types of files. specific files.
2) Have a desktop version of Safari instead of Mobile Safari. This will allow most web applications such as WhatsApp to run on the iPad even if there is no specific iPad application.
3) Create support for a mouse / trackpad, which will help immensely with applications requiring precision, such as photo and video editing applications. Apple already supports Pencil, which allows some precision work, but some applications and tasks work best with a pointing device.
I have no reason to believe that we will not see this in iOS 13. In fact, the iPad Pro is the main reason why I am excited about the next version of the iOS. With this new iPad, Apple has pushed the limits of the hardware and must give it the software it deserves.
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