Background: I usually work on a MacBook Pro with an external screen and keyboard, but now I decided to work on the same screen and keyboard on a 3rd generation iPad Pro with a 12.9 inch display. This is not the first time I work with a tablet and constantly take it on trips and for this purpose I specially purchased the Smart Keyboard Folio, but for the first time I decided to work with it fully from home with an external 27-inch display and a keyboard with a trackpad. I am a project manager, so my main tools are not narrowly specific and are aimed at team coordination, task tracking and communication, that is, Slack, Asana, various Google tools, Dropbox Paper, Zoom and Telegram are my daily set of basic programs. Well, and a tomato, of course.
Day 1
Since the Apple ecosystem almost always works perfectly, no adaptation was required, except for the installation of a tomato. But I immediately ran into the difficulty of switching keyboard layouts. At work, I have two languages ββof communication and I constantly switch from Russian to English and vice versa, so the keyboard shortcut is pressed several hundred times per hour. On the iPad, there is a special key with a globe for this ... It seems that the engineers who designed this never switch between languages. With the external keyboard, everything turned out to be even more fun: in the absence of a key with a globe, the keyboard is selected by holding the ctrl + shift + space keys, and the language is selected with the up and down keys.
The aspect ratio of the tablet screen is different from that of the external monitor, resulting in wasted space on the monitor left and right. In fact, this does not bother me much, since I am not a fan of looking for the necessary information with my eyes all over the 27 inch monitor. Well, since we started about this, I strongly dislike Google search because it presses all the information to the left corner. Why can't you do it in the middle?
When switching to a dark theme, the ears were no longer so conspicuous, but because of glare I am not a supporter of working behind a dark monitor, so I chose the lesser of evils and continued to work behind a light monitor.
Control. As it turns out, the brightness buttons on the external keyboard control the brightness of the tablet screen, and the volume buttons control the monitor sound level. In the end, the monitor brightness settings were also found in the wilds of the Settings application.
One of the funny things is that when you buy some kind of application, you need Face ID, and you look out from behind the monitor to the tablet so that it recognizes you. And it also stands open, unlike the computer, which I always had next to it in a folded upright state so as not to take up space on the desktop.
The next point is that not all tablet applications have the same functionality as their desktop or web versions. For example, the Dropbox Paper app, unlike the web version, does not allow changing access settings when creating a link to a document.
The fun started in the afternoon when I had a meeting with colleagues scheduled. It's good that I guessed to test Zoom 15 minutes before the meeting. My monitor has a built-in webcam, but it turned out that the camera works only on a tablet, and any switching between applications and even split-view immediately interrupts my video. I had to communicate with the tablet. Bottom line: the neck falls off, since the tablet was much lower than the monitor.
In general, the feeling at the end of the day was very pleasant: a cool interface, nothing distracts from a specific task and is just incredibly cool to focus on something without annoying messages, notifications and a bunch of tabs. But even by the end of the day, I was still confused with the layout and it greatly slowed down the typing speed when both Russian and English words were encountered in a sentence. By the way, unlike the poppy, the tablet does not remember which layout was the last time you opened a certain application.
Also, during the experiment, I appreciated how much better native applications are designed to work on a tablet. If in the full-fledged version you can swear at the Google interface, then in the version for the tablet the functionality is clearly lame, and the drobox, which just captivates with its design, has very few functions left, and the formatting has disappeared, so I even switched to the web version. VPN has also been tried out and apps respond to it as expected.
By the way, all the external devices that I use during my working day: speakers and headphones worked great because Zoom and Spotify are cute.
Day 2
The next day, the brain got used to the strange keyboard shortcut and switching the language was almost not annoying. I think that in a couple of days I would be completely used to it.
Towards noon, I tried putting the tablet in the Smart Keyboard Folio right in front of me as a keyboard, the trackpad remained in place. I love it: Face ID works great, and switching keyboard layouts is effortless.
Then came a series of programs to analyze our applications. And I found that not all applications are equally good or bad according to the principle of made by Apple / made by (name of the developer). So, for example, Google Analytics behaves almost perfectly in the form of an application (the scroll did not perform well), but App Store Connect is still not adapted for a tablet and is a copy of a poor version for a phone.
SplitView proved to be great: even when the scale of pages and tables was reduced to 60-70%, it was comfortable to work. Of the minuses: I did not understand how to open two Google tables side by side.
In the evening I also decided to look at different applications that I use not only for work. For example, my favorite application for various mind maps and graphs Microsoft Whiteboard turned out to be strange on an external monitor: I still drew while looking at the tablet. The same applies to a couple of graphic editors. Lightroom behaved as usual, but since there is no full version for a tablet yet, this was not particularly relevant to me. Instagram works very funny: it has a locked orientation for the tablet, but on the external display it rotated 90 degrees, but in order to scroll through the feed and interact with the application, the trackpad also had to be rotated 90 degrees (οΌβΈα)
Output
It turned out to be much more convenient to work with the tablet than I imagined. I thought that in an hour I would run back to my MacBook Pro and say that I would never cheat on it again, but to my surprise the next day I had a desire to continue working on the wonderful iPad.
The feeling was very interesting: because of the incredibly cool animations, transitions and design, it seems that the MacBook is something outdated, and you are finally working on a new generation device. All applications look the same tidy, almost nothing crashes (except for Google documents). The funny thing is that on the big screen, you can immediately see minor flaws in the applications in terms of design flaws, and I was pleased to note how cool and beautiful our applications look (especially when compared to the Michelin guide).
Syncing between iPhone and iPad seemed more seamless to me than between the same devices and MacBook. Of the huge advantages: photos are synchronized much faster between the phone and the tablet, and they are also loaded into the necessary documents through a normal interface, and not like on a poppy through one place.
The main conclusion: iPad is a full-fledged computer with a cool interface, and I think that in a couple of years it will be finished to the state of "for everyone", and computers will move into the class "for professionals."