The iPad Pro put to the test

No device will be everything to everyone. To highlight that, allow me to elaborate on how the three iPads I have at home are used. My wife uses her iPad Air as her primary large screen computing device – and by that, I mean for whenever/whatever she’s not using her iPhone for. My kids use their iPad Mini mainly for recreational purposes- i.e, playing games and watching videos but also prefer using the iPad over our iMac for homework whenever they can. And finally my iPad Air- it has been sitting untouched inside my bedside drawer for almost six months. I much prefer to use my MacBook or Surface Pro. The iPad is one of those devices where one size doesn’t fit all. And yes, the pun is very much intended as I begin this review of the iPad Pro that was provided to me by Apple.

The iPad Pro looks exactly how you would expect a larger sized iPad to look and is available in the same three colors- Silver, Gold and Space Gray. It’s got the same high quality build and a beautiful screen that is the largest and highest resolution screen Apple has ever built on an iOS device. Under the hood, it’s powered by the Apple A9X processor which makes everything fly- it’s definitely the most responsive tablet I’ve used. Apple has made it available in two storage capacities- 32GB and 128GB, latter of which can also be bought with an LTE radio. Apple has also added TouchID but it’s the first gen version and not as fast as the one on the iPhone 6s. What is new is USB 3.0 – however the cable bundled with the iPad Pro is still the 2.0 spec. Apple hasn’t made any announcements on if/when we’ll see this.

I remember giving the iPad a test as my primary device a couple of years back. That didn’t work out very well. But things change very fast in the tech world and two years almost sounds like ancient history. With the iPad Pro, I thought that I’d revisit my experiment and see if or how things have changed.

Here’s a list of what I mainly use my computer for, divided into three sections based on the frequency of my activities- daily, more than once a week, or less often.

Daily

1. Using Twitter, Feedly, Pocket and the Web for keeping up with the industry
2. Writing articles- usually done in Google Docs using a browser or Evernote using the app
3. Keeping up with email and calendar using Google Apps in a browser or Fantastical
4. Using Slack for all company communication
5. Using WordPress for editing and publishing articles
6. Using Pixelmator to work with images for articles from emails or iCloud
7. Listen to music using iTunes

More than once a week

1. Using my bank and accounting apps through a web browser
2. Using Final Cut Pro X for editing videos
3. Using Dropbox to view spreadsheets and presentations
4. Watermark images for the website

Less Often

1. Using Panic Transmit to FTP files and do some basic HTML editing
2. Using Excel to work on company reports, forecasts, etc.
3. Using Skype to interact with freelancers or clients

Looking at that list makes you think that the iPad Pro should be able to handle my work life fairly easily. One of the main reasons for that is that I’ve worked hard on moving any possible part of my organization’s workflow to the cloud. I’m a sincere believer in using the web browser and mobile apps for any and everything.

To see how well the iPad Pro fits into my work life, I used it as a substitute for my office MacBook Pro. I understand the iPad Pro is not a replacement for my MacBook Pro but if I were to buy one, it would be mostly for work. I had it set up on my desk in landscape mode with the Smart Cover providing the support for it. I used it for the three work days and the weekend to make sure that I test it with almost everything I would need to. At work, I’d start each of my day with the iPad Pro and if I come to a task which the iPad Pro couldn’t handle, I’d switch to the MacBook Pro. Ideally, I would have loved to get by at least one day without turning my MacBook Pro. That didn’t happen.

Day 1 with the iPad Pro

I started the first day setting my iPad Pro with my email account and iCloud account as well as downloading all the apps I would require. Many of the services I use on my MacBook Pro through  a browser such as Xero for accounting or EmiratesNBD for banking, have apps on the App Store and ideally, an app should provide a better experience than its web based service. Sadly that’s not the case.

Once the iPad Pro was all set up, I started going about my usual activities such as checking emails and calendar, using Slack and typing documents such as this one. The iPad Pro handled all of this with ease. Slack has done a decent job with its app for the iPad Pro but it’s still not as good as the desktop counterpart- for example, easily unstarring items. An inconvenience but nothing that stopped me from using the iPad Pro. What I do like is that multi-tasking on iPad Pro’s big screen makes it easier to use two application at the same time. I preferred to have either Twitter or Slack running in a small window on the right while the left side was occupied by apps like Safari or Word.

Where I did hit a roadblock was when my bank wanted a printed copy of my passport and the company’s trade license. I have both those documents stored on the cloud so accessing them wasn’t an issue. The iPad supports printing so that wasn’t as issue either. But the problem of not having any options for printing turned out to be an issue. For some reason, the iPad Pro was printing my passport as a full A4 sized document and the Trade Licence at just a quarter of its size. I had to switch to my MacBook Pro which gives me the option to scale the images correctly to print the right sizes for each of the documents.

The second problem I ran into, and this is a bigger concern is how the backend of Tbreak works on an iPad. I use WordPress with a custom theme and trying to scroll around when posting an article on the backend was just plain difficult. Either the screen would not scroll or when it would, it would bounce back. WordPress has an app but the problem with that is that it doesn’t support any of the advanced features you get from plugins- such as SEO settings, review scores or the layout for an article. I had to switch to the Mac for adding articles to my website and I did not come back to the iPad Pro that day.

Day 2 with the iPad Pro

The second day started with handling some finances. I use Xero for all my company’s accounts and had to mark some invoices as paid. Both Xero and my bank have iOS apps so i figured this would be fairly easy process. Nope. The Xero app lets you view all the invoices but I can’t apply any payments. And the bank app doesn’t allow me to copy anything such as the description of the transaction that I needed to paste into Xero. This app situation reminded me of the time when I was switching from apps that run locally to their cloud counterparts. There was a big feature disparity. Mobile apps currently suffer a similar problem.

I used Safari on my iPad Pro to complete all the accounting using the respective websites of my bank and the accounting app but it wasn’t as smooth of an experience as it is on the Mac. Nevertheless, it worked. The next task was one that I was pretty sure would make me run for my Mac but surprisingly it didn’t. One of the plugins on my website needed to be updated which meant downloading the plugin from the author, unzipping it and then uploading it using FTP. On my Mac, I use Transmit for this so I thought I’d give Transmit a shot on the iPad Pro. Expecting a somewhat similar crippled experience like the other two mobile apps, I launched Transmit but was super excited to see it work very much like my Mac. It creates a local documents folder where I was able to download the zip file using Safari and then using Transmit, I was able to access that folder, unzip the file and upload its content to my FTP server.

So who wants to complain about the lack of a file system now?

Not only did I manage to upload all the files, I was also able to edit one of the HTML documents to modify some settings within Transmit. Panic has set an example on how PC apps should be ported to mobile apps.

But then it was time to go back to WordPress to work on some articles, so I had to switch back to my Mac. By the end of day two, it was quite clear that the iPad Pro would not be replacing my MacBook any time soon. It was also clear that I need to re-evaluate some of the tools I’m using on a daily basis.

Day 3 with the iPad Pro

The third day started with me working on a story for Medium. I imagined this would be fairly easy as Medium is a VERY new publishing platform and the developers for its mobile app must’ve thought about users publishing on the go. Sadly,the Medium app only works in portrait mode. I couldn’t use it with my iPad Pro laying on my table in landscape mode. It’s only until you get to the editor that the app allows you to use it in a landscape mode. Also, there is no option to add a post to your publication using the mobile app. Sigh.

I also wanted to give the iPad Pro a shot with video editing. Although I didn’t have a particular project to edit, I figured it would be good exercise to recreate something I’ve already worked on Final Cut on my Mac. The app I tried on the iPad Pro was iMovie and after a few minutes with it, I started liking it. I was able to import assets from my iCloud Drive into it such as the intro and background music while actual footage was simply brought over from my iPhone’s camera roll.  iMovie definitely does not come close to the flexibility that Final Cut Pro offers but for a quick video edit where I need to insert our intro, add some background music and edit some parts off, it worked fairly well. The only thing I couldn’t do was add a watermark on the video. Also, positioning background audio was a bit tricky.

My final task for the day was adding some banners to our website using Google’s DFP platform. A client had sent across an ad in email which was luckily a jpg image that I could save on my iPad but I’m pretty such that were it an .swf file, this would not have been possible. But even with the jpg image, DFP’s backend was not easy to work with on the iPad and it would just not work when it came time to save the creative. Back to the MacBook Pro.

It was time for the iPad to stop working and start playing. The first thing I did was fire up Netflix to watch Master of None and it was nice to have a big screen to enjoy the videos on. My wife also loved the larger screen and, I imagine, is hoping for me to replace her iPad Air with the Pro at some time. I also watched some YouTube videos, as well as Amazon’s new series Man in the High Tower.

Besides the beautiful and large screen, the iPad Pro produces amazing audio as well. In fact, I’ve been asked twice whether the sound was really coming out of the iPad Pro. Apple has added sensors to the speakers so it can separate the left from the right and the top from the bottom no matter how you hold it. It’s truly incredible audio and makes watching videos and playing games a lot more fun.

Games are also the obvious choice for a device like the iPad Pro with it’s big screen and brilliant audio. I played a bit of Geometry Wars and Hearthstone. The experience on both was good but I can’t wait for a game to use the full potential of an iPad Pro. Right now, everything is just a scaled up version of the regular iPad.

One more thing that the iPad Pro was used for over the weekend was art practice. My 10 year old likes to doodle and she asked me if she could borrow the iPad Pro to sketch some things out. I’d bought her an iPod Touch for her birthday earlier this year and before I knew it, she was watching a tutorial on drawing some of her favorite cartoon characters on the iPod Touch and practicing that on the iPad Pro. It was beautiful to see that.

Surface Pen vs Apple Pencil

Let me set something straight. My six year old draws butterflies better than me. So I’m not necessarily the right person to judge how good the Apple pencil is. But here’s what I can tell you based on my usage of the Surface Pro 4’s Pen and the Apple Pencil:

Feature-wise, Microsoft’s Pen wins hands down. The fact that you can click the back of it to start OneNote or double click to instantly take a screenshot and clip it to a note is brilliant and time saving. Also, the back of the Pen acts as an eraser and it magnetically attaches to the Surface Pro which are both very thought out features. None of that is present on the Apple Pencil.

Where the Apple Pencil wins is not only the way it feels in your hand but also the lower latency and better pressure sensitivity. Using both the Surface Pen and the Apple Pencil, I tried drawing curves with applying varying degrees of pressure and at many times, the Pen would stop drawing even though it’s tip was lightly touching the Surface. The Pencil on the other hand never lost track and the line flowed continuously just like it would with a real writing instrument.

Final Words

At this time, I think that only the designers and artists would appreciate the “Pro” aspect of the iPad Pro. I really wanted the iPad Pro to work as my primary device, but it can’t do that just yet. For the iPad Pro to be in that position, there is a lot of work that needs to be done. Websites need to make their interfaces more touch friendly and mobile apps need to stop being crippled versions of their cloud counterparts. We also need apps like Final Cut Pro or the full version of Photoshop.

You can argue that all of what I’ve said works well on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4. And you’re absolutely right. But would you rather use a device that handles everything designed twenty years back really well, or are you willing to take a chance on a platform that will set the tone for the next twenty years. With the iPad Pro, I feel that Apple is doing just that- bringing its vision of the future of computing. The hardware is here already and I can’t wait to see what Apple shows at WWDC next year with iOS X.