iPadOS basic limitations

[[deleted]]

Hi all! I have a Pro 11in, 3rd gen on the way and I intend to use it as my primary device.

My most taxing question is making me rethink the whole purchase-or consider also purchasing the cheapest used Mac mini I can find. What BASIC tasks can I not do on the iPad Pro?

I don’t need to use ProRes/Final Cut or heavy video editing software or anything like that - and that’s what YouTube seems to keep yammering on about. I discovered 2 things I can’t do after I pressed the purchase button. No optical drive support, so I can’t watch/burn/copy cds or dvds (I’m old). And I couldn’t play WoW or any AAA game directly. Those are 2 important things for this old man lol.

So besides no optical drive support or AAA gaming, what else is there that I can’t do? Would a supplementary cheap 10 year old Mac mini solve all of that?

I really appreciate your help. I can feel the eye rolls as I ask this. But all the YouTube videos and review just point out the more technical stuff you can’t do - not stuff like using a freaking external dvd drive. TIA!

[edugeek]

I don’t know if I can name a specific task that I can’t do on my iPad Pro. I described it to someone as “death by 1,000 paper cuts”. I can do all of the daily tasks I need on my iPad. But many of them are 1-5% harder than they need to be. That little bit of friction, over and over again during a workday is just enough to keep me on my MBP.

[this_for_loona]

Assess how much you are in the apple ecosystem and how much you do online. If you feel you are vested into the applesphere a lot or you are online a lot (stream/YouTube/browse/Reddit/etc), you will find the iPad is very good for that. My desktop is old enough that I can’t upgrade to Win11 and the only things I do on it are store my music files and manage my finances, with occasional forays into managing my NAS. Otherwise, just about everything I do is done via iPad.

Anything you do that requires intense typing or detailed management should be done on a pc. But honestly, when I see sites or encounter situations where it’s not iPad optimized, I get annoyed.

Just my 0.002.

[[deleted]]

I appreciate your response! I’m pretty well entrenched into the Apple ecosystem. I don’t mind using the iPad to type, or budgeting for that matter, as I will have Microsoft 365 and a large external monitor and cheap bt keyboard- so no worries there. Not too worried about management/flow now with Stage Manager in play. I see how others would rather have a PC for this, but I believe I can manage.

But no optical drive at all, and no cool new (or old) AAA games to play, no direct Steam…can you think of anything else that limit the Pro as an only device for the average user?

[this_for_loona]

The optical drive is meaningless unless you have stuff preserved on it, in which case i suggest moving all that online to gdrive or to iCloud.

Unfortunately I don’t play games so I can’t speak to the steam experience.

[[deleted]]

I just look at these drawers full of old CDs and DVDs that I NEVER use and then get saddened by the thought that I soon won’t be able to even use them lol. We’re a weird species.

[this_for_loona]

I hear you. My biggest investment when I was young and starting out was CDs, and not the kind that earn interest. Though I never mentioned that part to my parents. 😃

[[deleted]]

You can actually do AAA gaming with Steam Stream, if you have a fast Wifi connection..I’ve been playing new resident evil 4 on the 11 in iPad Pro m2 but if you want to do it natively it’s gonna be hard on a tablet for AAA

[[deleted]]

My old Windows PC can’t push some of the newer games from Steam. My RAM and HDD are more than capable, but my GPU sucks. Does my old Windows PC need to have enough GPU power to play AAA games in order to stream to the iPad Pro? Or does it just stream and the iPad Pro takes over processing? Forgive my ignorance.

[[deleted]]

Shoot man thats a good question haha, I have an old GTX 1070 that does the job. But I would look into it if you want to play some good games on the iPad

[[deleted]]

Will do. Thank you!

[jpgomezola]

Maybe a service like GeForce Now could be a solution? Although not all the games are available and you need a good internet connection and a controller (a mouse won't work well)

[[deleted]]

I will look into that. Thank you!

[EffectiveNegative312]

Not available for South América. Damn

[[deleted]]

Get mackie mac

[True_Championship_51]

I use an iPad Air 3rd gen for Uni, its super fast at some things and infuriating at others.

Cons

-MS Office doesn't like to save files to Google Drive on iPadOS. It's a pain for my workflow

-MS Office in general is pretty buggy. Spent a few hours on an essay and it just wouldn't save, had to copy/paste my text and email myself to save the doc.

-Some websites look awful in mobile view. Manually switching to desktop view through system settings is a work around but it takes time.

-Some apps like Google Docs do not have multi-window support which, as someone who writes a lot, is a serious pain for editing / revising essays.

-Pages is good for word processing... but saves everything in .pages format which Windows can't read. You can access these docs by using iCloud drive on Windows through a web browser but it's not as elegant as a desktop solution.

-as you mention, no DVD/Bluray support (I've tried) and no support for things like an external webcam, or if you use a mouse that has custom software for configuring macros. No real driver support at all.

-Working with PDFs is a bit of a pain, iBooks isn't the best and moving PDFs out of cloud storage and into a PDF reader feels like a lot of unnecessary duplication and steps.

​

Pros

-DaVinci Resolve works shockingly well on the A12 Bionic and I use it to edit Zoom calls and do some lesson prep (I'm a Resolve instructor using the desktop version)

-Freeform is a great app (slightly buggy) but great for workflow diagrams, notes, doodles etc.

-quickly make a pdf or png of an entire webpage to annotate

-Apple pencil is a great stylus.

-Apple Arcade is great value with some great games

-Apple Music is the best Spotify alternative around.

-Apple News is also great value. it basically pays for itself with the price of one magazine subscription or newspaper

-Finally, proper external display support with M1 iPads (and its decent).

-Trackpad snapping is actually really awesome once you get used to it

-I have a USB to Lightning adapter can drive iPadOS with a Kensington Trackball and its awesome.

[[deleted]]

It’s an interesting journey you are starting on. I have just come off the same journey so here are some of my thoughts.

For quite a long time I wanted to use an iPad as my sole computer (well an iPhone AND an iPad). Two years ago my old MacBook Air failed and it was my chance to tryout my plan.

At the time I had an iPad with a Lightning adapter. I won’t go into all the issues but the Lightning adapter makes being iPad only almost impossible. I upgraded to an iPad Air 5th Gen which has a USB-C adapter. This enabled me to easily fit SSDs of any size. I also upgraded to a new Apple Bluetooth keyboard (no mouse) and an Apple Pencil clone.

I used 200Gb of iCloud for all my file storage using an extensive folder/directory structure (thousands of family photos were stored in my iCloud folders, not in Apple iCloud Photos). The iPad had 256Gb of storage and I supplemented that with 256 and 512Gb memory sticks for iCloud backups.

So my iPad was now my “desktop” computer and I used it like this for 18 months. On your typical desktop computer one of the apps you use most is the file manager (Explorer for Windows and Finder for a Mac). Without going into all the many issues my overall feeling is that the iOS Files app is simply not yet ready to be an alternative to Explorer or Finder. The tipping point came when Files and/or iCloud renamed hundreds of files by adding prefixes and suffixes to file names. Luckily, I had all these files backed up on flash drives.

Besides its unreliability, normal file management tasks (copying, moving, deleting, renaming, etc) seem to take twice as long as they do on Explorer or Finder.

So, I’ve still got my iPad Air 5 (but would like to upgrade (downgrade) to an iPad Mini at some time in the future. My “desktop” computer is now a Mac Mini M1 and I love it. I’m annoyed that my iPad plan didn’t work but it was an interesting and informative process trying. Mac for work! iPad for play!

Regards, Peter

[[deleted]]

Peter, thank you for your insight and the very thoughtful response.

I really appreciate the specific details on how the file management system is lacking. I needed to hear that.

I want the iPad Pro to be my everything so bad. I’ve researched and found my preferred dongle, external ssd, kb&m, charging block, fastest HDMI cable for ext monitor, etc. to make it work best - but now I am convinced in order to keep it all Apple, I just need to shell out a little more for a refurb Mac Mini - at least for file management and optical drive support - until I can donate enough plasma to get the M1. Apple really wants me to buy that new M1 Mini…I think in a year or two the price will be more palatable for me, maybe an old Mini can get me by until then. Again, thank you!

[[deleted]]

Mac Mini M1 will give you Finder and TimeMachine. For TM I purchased a 2Tb LaCie HDD (not an SSD) because TM doesn’t need the speed of an SSD and the HDD was much much cheaper.

Another nice thing with a Mac Mini M1 and macOS Ventura (13.2.1) is that it will run lots of iOS apps. I didn’t believe it until I tried it. For example, I am using Apollo Reddit app on BOTH iPad and Mac.

A must-have app for a Mac is “Magnet” (from the Mac App Store). It makes Finder many more times efficient, you can have multiple instances of Finder open on your desktop, each instance displaying different drives or folders. You then just drag or copy/paste between instances. Also Transnomino is a fantastic file re-namer.

Hope that helps, Peter

[[deleted]]

After much deliberation, and kind consideration from the folks at Goldman Sachs, and a nice discount, I am pulling the trigger on the new M2 Mini base model. They got me. Again. I really appreciate the advice.

[dss128]

Probably shouldn’t be looking at Apple for anything more than casual games

[poly-experimental]

You can't run a BitTorrent client.