I love my 11-inch iPad Pro from 2018. From the moment I picked it up until some time earlier this year, the iPad Pro was my main device. I used it for everything from reading and surfing the web to writing my articles, screenplays, and novels, to editing videos. In fact, since the first iPad, I have been an avid iPad user, despite the fact that I didn’t feel like the software on the iPad was up to snuff all the time.
But then I got the M1 MacBook Air and things slowly started to change. I found myself not using the iPad Pro as my main device anymore. It wasn’t because I loved the MacBook more, but that I kept running into limitations that I didn’t like on the iPad. Limitations that grew too frustrating to ignore anymore. It pushed me towards my MacBook Air more and I found myself not using the iPad Pro as my main device anymore.
No Software Parity
For me, the iPad has always been a device that can become just about anything. It’s more portable than a laptop, you can hold it, touch the screen, dock it in with a keyboard, mouse, and/or monitor. I love the 11-inch form factor with a Smart Keyboard, I feel like it’s just as good as a laptop in use. But like I mentioned in a previous article, apps on the iPad are second-class citizens to their Mac apps.
I know that my use case is different than most. I’m a writer first and foremost. For most people, the available apps will work for most people. Those that need specialized apps are stuck though. They are at the mercy of the developers to bring feature parity to the iPad or users will have to find a workaround. That’s where I find myself most these days.
Lately, when I have gotten a chance to write, I’ve been writing screenplays (nothing is finished just yet, but progress is being made). I’ve been using Final Draft for years, and I’m used to it. Final Draft for the Mac is on version 12 and the iOS version has been around for years as well. The iOS version is even great for writing. It has nearly all of the features that the Mac version does when it comes to that one task.
But the iPad version really lacks when it comes to pre-writing features.
The past 2 version of Final Draft for Mac has a beat board where you can plot out ideas, move things around, resize ideas, and connect them with lines. All of these help me when I’m planning out my story, and feel like a natural fit on the iPad, but they aren’t there. In fact, for a while, if you opened a file on your iPad it would erase everything you had done on your beat board when you opened it again on your Mac.
The beat board seems like such a natural fit for the iPad. I can imagine using my fingers to drag cards around, connect them to others, and resize them with a pinch. But the feature is no where to be found. It’s hard to tell if the feature is even in the works for the iPad. Maybe Final Draft doesn’t want to commit to the feature when the app on the iPad only cost $29.99 while the Mac version costs $200. But this isn’t the only app that leaves out features.
Sure there are other apps that I could use on the iPad that could replicate the feature, but then what? It wouldn’t be in my Final Draft file, so I would have to use 2 apps on the iPad and the Mac when only 1 app is needed in the Mac.
Again, I’m not a developer. I’m not trying to condemn developers either. All I’m really asking for is for apps to bring some parity. Bring the features that seem like a natural fit to the iPad! It’s the future of computing after all!
iPadOS
So many complain that they can’t do things on the iPad that they can do on the Mac because iPadOS isn’t a real operating system for work. I don’t really buy that at all. I don’t blame Apple for the fault of another developer’s app. I don’t know what the backend of all the apps looks like, but I don’t feel like Final Draft is held back by iPad frameworks.
When Apple released the newest iPad Pros with the M1 chip, developers revealed that iPad apps couldn’t use more than 5 gigabytes of memory. Now the iPad Pros come with 8 or 16 GB of ram and developers couldn’t use all of that memory. But so what? My 2018 iPad Pro still runs buttery smooth for everything. I don’t think a beat board would push the limits of the memory the app would need. So really, I think iPadOS is fine. In fact, iPadOS 15, coming later in 2021, will allow developers to access more ram.
But the bigger issue is that most developers favor the iPhone and Mac over the iPad. Final Draft could bring a better app to the iPad, but they don’t. They still treat the iPad as a second-class citizen. Until developers really push the iPad as a device that can compute, I don’t see things really changing.
Of course, this could all be fixed if Apple would just push more of their professional apps to the iPad. They made a good start when they announced that with iPadOS 15, developers will be able to code their apps inside Swift Playgrounds on the iPad. Maybe that will help turn the tide of low-quality apps, but I doubt it.
Maybe, since I’ve been excited about the iPad since it came out, I would think that developers would be excited about the tablet device too. I still think that the iPad has a great future in front of it, but I’m tired of waiting around on the apps to evolve.
Other Little Things That Made Me Drop the iPad Pro as My Main Device
While I do think that iPadOS is strong enough to be a great operating system for pro-level apps, there are still a few little areas with it that Apple hasn’t changed in a while that made it subpar compared to a Mac.
For one, the way that the iPad handled multitasking could become frustrating. If you didn’t have an app in your dock, there was a fancy dance you had to do to get things in multiple windows. Get to the Home Screen, open an app, swipe up, and hope you had the other app you wanted to use in your dock. It just wasn’t friendly to users. With iPadOS 15, that seems to be changing. I like the way Apple has changed things, and better yet, they didn’t kill the old way of drag and drop to multitask either. I think it will make it so much easier to multitask.
Also, last year when Apple added pointer support to the iPad, users were floored. While the Magic Keyboard is a little too expensive for me when I already had the Smart Keyboard, I did get to plug my iPad into my docking stations at work. Using the mouse and keyboard on my dock was a dream and easy to use, but using the iPad on a monitor left some things to be desired. The resolution of the monitor would mimic the iPad and there were no other options. Trying to watch a video on the monitor could also be troublesome too, with the video often not even playing. Sadly, Apple hasn’t done anything to fix external monitor support in iPadOS 15. I do think they are setting the groundwork for it, with the iPad Pros getting thunderbolt support and the way multi-window support is coming. I can imagine a time when you push the new three buttons at the top of the app to open the multitasking window and there is an option to send the app to the monitor.
The Future
One day, I think I will use my iPad Pro as my main device again, but there need to be some changes. For starters, the apps I need on the iPad need to advance further and get parity with their Mac counterparts. I could also use some external monitor support. If those two things get fixed, I will return to the iPad Pro as my main device. The iPad is such a versatile device, and once it gets feature parity with my Mac, I will happily move back.
What do you think? Does the iPad fit all your needs? Is there something you wish it had that I didn’t mention. Let me know in the comments!